Dead Of Winter (The Beautiful Dead Book 2)

by Daryl Banner

  I’ve gotten to my feet and my fingers have magically made fists at my sides. “I told you what would happen. You and Jim run off to conduct this deed with Megan’s eye, all the while rubbing your fling in everyone’s face—”

  “It’s not a fling!” Ann cries out. “You’re one to talk, you big hypocrite. Everyone knows about you and John.”

  I’m dumbstruck. “That doesn’t even compare, Ann.”

  “It’s the exact same thing! You two even live together! You ought to hear what they say about you,” she spits at me, shaking with rage.

  “Stop, both of you.” John’s come up to my side. “We have a worse issue on our hands. They’re all fighting, Ann? Where are they fighting?”

  “Right outside, if you’d just listen,” she snaps back.

  John doesn’t hesitate a second. Hurrying to the door, he lets himself out. I take a quick glance at Helena, who appears quite unsettled by all of this herself, then follow John out of the Town Hall to survey our damage control.

  The evening crowd in the Square is nothing pretty. A handful of Humans are banded together, shouting at the Chief and a number of Undead. To my surprise, John rushes down the steps and inserts himself right into the argument. I can hardly make out any of the words, for all the shouting and heated debate.

  I focus suddenly on the faces of Ken and Bonnie who appear like two ice cubes in a pond of unstill waters. Finally, Ken is able to gather enough of the crowd’s attention for his demand to be heard: “Show her to me.”

  This is all I hear. It’s all I need to hear to know the whole thing is doomed. Ken and Bonnie will take one look at their deformed daughter, and all hope we ever had of reconciling and coexisting with the Humans will be gone in a single glance.

  “Show her to me,” he repeats.

  The Chief looks back at me, meeting my eyes, and then he seems to peer beyond me. The crowd is struck silent all of a sudden. I’m confused by why until I bother to turn around myself and see who else has joined us.

  Megan. And she is not alone. Walking slowly behind her: Brains. Marigold has repaired Brain’s face, though there is plenty of room for improvement. Also, there’s a development of extra fingers protruding from the back of Brain’s neck, as well as extra hands on her shoulders and down her hips. They almost appear like feathers, except for the unsettling way they seem to wiggle and twitch. If this isn’t strange enough a sight, the Deathless ghoul that is my Raise is wearing a collar and a leash, which Megan gently holds, guiding her.

  I can’t believe what I’m seeing.

  “It’s okay,” Megan explains timidly to the spread of Humans and Undead in the Square. No one at all seems convinced. “It’s perfectly okay. I’ve been training my powers. I can speak to them. I can.” She looks up at Brains, hope in her eye. “Tell them your name.”

  Brains looks out at the crowd. Half her hair is missing and her nose is an inch too far to the left, and her right ear appears to be sewn on upside-down, and she opens her mouth and says, “I am Deathleblghalbmgblghglh.”

  Her tongue deposits itself onto the Town Hall steps.

  “MEGAN!” cries out Ken, or maybe it was Bonnie, I can’t be sure, because suddenly Brains is making an open-mouthed lunge at Megan’s neck.

  Several things happen. I jump forward to intercept the two at precisely the same time an arrow is loosed from somewhere in the crowd. The arrow—intended for Brains—lands in me instead, and I scream out, feeling an otherworldly agony that I cannot hope to compare to anything I have in this existence felt. At the same time, the Humans are trampling over the Undead, cursing and screaming, steel swords bared and axes lifted and arrows nocking.

  I can’t see anything, curling up on the steps in agony. For a solid handful of seconds, I don’t even try to dislodge the arrow because I can’t even tell where it landed; my entire body is in unrelenting pain.

  Suddenly the arrow’s been yanked free—it was in my right shoulder, by the way—and even as the steam rises, Helena seems to pay it no mind, yanking me back onto my feet. I find Megan racing into the crowd in pursuit of Brains, who’s gotten away from her. The sights I witness are so horrifying, I don’t know what to look at or how to look away.

  A man’s struck an axe into another’s back—an Undead I should hope. The other is countering with a blunt knife.

  Two women are climbing over each other, trying to be the first one to reach a sword that’s fallen to the ground between them.

  There’s a bleeding child screaming, clutching a doll.

  “Winter, you’ve got to move your legs!”

  The pain is still lancing its way up and down my body. Doesn’t anyone notice the chimney that’s been made of my shoulder?

  Helena’s grabbed a hold of me, rushing me through the crowd. I cry out John’s name. The horror surrounds us as Helena plunges through. Metal clangs against metal. Screams are cut off mid-scream. I hear a boy shouting for his mommy and I hear an Undead cry out in the name of Trenton, and I want to ask, wasn’t this city supposed to be all of ours?

  Helena slams her back against the wall of a building, trapped by people fighting, unable to proceed further, and she says, “Girl, we have ourselves a battle sooner than we’d planned.”

  That’s when I see it. “Hel, look!” I cry out, drunk by the pain that’s twisting through me. “Look, look, look, the bird!”

  I’m watching the sky, insane with agony, seeing the beautiful thing approaching. “Quiet your mouth,” Helena shouts back at me, freaked out. “Focus, and tell me if—”

  “There,” I whisper. “Hel, tell me you see it!”

  She squints into the sky, indulging me, and then her face fills with awe. Mine too, as I realize only now that there’s more than one. “Birds,” I say, disbelieving my eyes. It’s such a beautiful sight, I forget that I’m even hurting. Or maybe the pain’s gone away. “They’re coming …!”

  I’m not the only one who sees them. The fighting in the Square has ebbed practically to a standstill. A lady brandishing a shovel looks up, her eyes wide. A boy too, breath turning to mist before his jaw-dropped mouth. Soon, the whole courtyard is silenced by the approaching flock. They all see it. I smile broadly, awed, overcome with the vision in the sky. Have the birds come to free us from chaos? Have they come to remind us that life is still something to hope for? All is not lost.

  Then I watch the awe in Helena’s face as it slowly dies. “Winter. Those … aren’t birds.”

  Confused, I squint at the closest of the birds, watching it flutter closer, closer, closer … and then realize with mounting horror that Helena is right. The thing flying in the sky … is not a bird. None of them are. The size of the flying—things—are already large from a distance. They seem the size of an eagle. Then the size of a vulture as they draw closer. And then the one in front grows to the size of a person as it approaches.

  Half a person. With scorpion legs.

  And then our attention is stolen anew by screams in the center of the Square—and it’s not of another skirmish breaking out.

  I can’t see what’s happening until it’s too late. The Humans and the Undead no longer have an interest in fighting one another; they’re all running away screaming. When I finally manage a glimpse through the crowd, a scream of my own catches in my throat.

  Bursting forth from the muddy ground at the foot of the stage are spiders. Giant spiders, like the one Gunner and I fought. Tens and twenties of them. Countless.

  Helena needs no instruction. She’s running with the rest of them, carrying damaged-me in her bony arms. Screams threaten to shatter the windows of the homes and buildings we pass as the nightmarish band of insects scurry in pursuit of us, and they are nothing kind. I watch over Helena’s shoulder as a spider leaps on a man’s face. What the arachnid does to the man, I cannot say, as the crowd of running and screaming people block my view.

  Helena’s foot catches, and the pair of us tumble to the ground. Instantly—and unkindly—we are trampled by Human and Undead alike, al
l of them howling with fear and scurrying like the insects. A window shatters to my left as a man leaps into a store for cover—unknowingly pursued by an enormous … wait, is that a cockroach??

  Yes, it is. Very, very large cockroaches that I am now seeing skitter by. Beetles. And odd scorpion-like hybrids and fluttering crickets with buzzing legs, all of them the size of cats and dogs. Squeals and shouts explode across the Square as half the Humans run for their lives while the remaining half, to my surprise, begin fighting back. They’re clubbing with their steel weapons, swinging their swords, jabbing and hammering and giving impressive war-cries to the onslaught of insects.

  The worst of the crowd has passed, enough for Hel and I to get back to our feet. Instantly I look into the sky, only to find that the flying creatures are gone.

  What were they?

  “Helena,” I quickly begin to confess. “Gunner and I encountered this really big spider in the woods, and—”

  “Get a weapon!” she cries out, reaching for what appears to be a metal rod on the ground, then dives into the business of clubbing a giant tarantula that’s come too close for comfort.

  Then I see it. Through the chaos of movement and weapons and limbs, there is a figure as still as a statue. Half a woman, carried by an arsenal of scorpion legs beneath … and her eyes are on me.

  I back away, then realize I’m already against a wall.

  Instantly, the half-woman-half-scorpion thing flies—flies!—across the Square, and just as I try to run, she’s pinned me to the wall with four of her spindly legs.

  From a distance, she was one thing. Upclose, another entirely.

  Her face is a pox of blemishes and cuts, yet through it all she is unexpectedly beautiful, framed with bubblegum-pink hair dirtied by dirt, twigs, and leaves. Her lips are lush and smirking with the wickedness of a girl up to no good. A spray of earrings decorate her left ear, and the party doesn’t stop there; down her left shoulder and arm is an ink mural of snakes and dragons and mythical beasts I can’t name. Beneath the punk-girl torso, there is a horror of giant insect legs that all seem to work in perfect harmony, as four of them have me pinned helplessly against the wall. Enormous dragonfly wings fold along her body and, still smirking impishly, her face draws so close to mine, I might think she intends to give me a kiss.

  “What the hell are you?” I blurt out.

  “Intrigued,” she answers, her eyes so close I can’t tell what color they are, blue, violet, red, pink. Her voice is silky and her strange accent could place her anywhere in the world and I’d believe it.

  “Please, tell your—insects—to stop! These people are my family, please …”

  Begging a half-woman-half-scorpion-monster-thing for my life is not at the top of the list of things I expected to do today.

  “The insects are my family,” the lady-creature replies, licking her lips.

  “Oh.” Now I realize what’s happening. “I g-get it. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I—Listen, I was in the woods and—”

  “It was the boy that killed it,” the lady-creature says. Then her crazy-iridescent eyes turn sad. “You only took off the poor thing’s legs. Two of them, I watched. Did you keep them?”

  I gape. “Keep them …?”

  “That’s what I would’ve done.” Her whole face turns light and she starts giggling. All the chaos and murder and mayhem around her, and she’s giggling. “See? Like this.” To demonstrate, she grabs a nearby tarantula by one of its feet—the one Helena was trying to bludgeon to death—and indelicately pulls one of its legs from the body. Then she thrusts the twitching limb at her lower abdomen, working the flesh and, and—no, I’m not going to watch.

  “Look here. See?” The lady-creature sounds peeved that I am not looking, so I take a reluctant glance. The tarantula leg has become part of her arrangement now; it even twitches, though it’s too high up to touch the ground. “I never let them go. Too precious.”

  I struggle in vain to break free for exactly five seconds before giving up, annoyed. “Can you please let me go, or at least eat me and be done with it?”

  Her face screws up cutely, like a child who’d just been told a new word. “Eat? I’ve never eaten anything before. You want me to try it?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t want to either. What are you called?”

  People are fighting for their lives all around us, Helena still battling a one-less-legged tarantula to the death, and the lady-creature and I are having a freaking conversation over tea. “W-Winter.”

  “I’m Shee.” She lifts her left arm, inked from shoulder to wrist. “Do you know what these pictures mean?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I.” Shee giggles. “Can we be friends?”

  “LET ME GO!” I scream, fed up. My legs can’t even move, pinned by something I can’t see. I have no means whatsoever with which to attack her. John is in that mess out there and I want to know he’s still alive. Megan too, and the Chief, and Marigold … “LET ME GO!!”

  “But then you’ll run away.” Her eyes scrunch up, her lips turning pouty. “They always run away. No one ever stays to play with me.”

  She looks my age. Maybe twenty. And she’s talking like a lonely child on the playground.

  “Maybe we can come to a truce,” I tell her quickly, turning desperate now. “Those are my friends out there. And those—those spiders and things are your friends, family, whatever. Let’s call a truce and all of us can be friends. How does that sound?”

  “Sounds nice,” says Shee, grinning dreamily.

  “Great. Good. Now tell them to stop.”

  “Oh. I don’t control them. They’re free to do as they please.”

  Helena is wrestling with the tarantula now. She’s literally hugging it, grappling with the hairy thing and grunting madly.

  “I’ll be your friend,” I exclaim. “Let’s be friends. I’m Winter. I’ll be your friend, Shee. I’ll be your bestie.”

  Just let me go. Let me go, you insane creature-thing.

  She grabs my face with her hands, staring into my eyes. “Great! Did you come into this world like I did?”

  I frown. “How’d you come into this world? Can you let go of me, maybe?”

  She doesn’t. “I came out of the ground.”

  Out of the ground. This woman doesn’t eat. She’s chaotic, playful, unaware, uncivilized. She keeps company with giant insects and even attached parts of them to herself for legs. This woman is Undead. Her bugs are not.

  “I did too,” I tell her.

  “Were your legs missing when you came out of the ground?” she goes on, tilting her head to the side. “Mine were. I had to find legs.” It appears she’s found many. “Do you have any pictures on your body?”

  Suddenly there’s an arrow stuck in the side of her head. She regards it the way one might bat at a fly, then returns her attention to me. “Will you come with me?”

  “Please, I should really be—”

  Another arrow hits her in the shoulder and, entirely unfazed, she says, “Let me show you something!”

  In an instant, her legs maneuver around mine and, tangled among them, I’m dragged along for a ride. Yelling out, I claw at the ground as the Shee-thing drags me across the Square. I’m desperately looking through the crowd—which appears to have dissipated greatly—and see no sign of John, or Megan, or even Brains …

  “LET ME GO!” I scream, kicking, thrusting, but there is no action I perform that gets me any closer to breaking free. She has me in a perfected prison of a clutch.

  “Right here!” she says, twisting my body around and showing me a bushel of flowers. She’s taken me into the Human’s Quarter, just outside the bakery. “Look at them. Oh, but don’t touch, don’t touch. It’s very bad if we touch them.”

  “I know.” I’m so desperate to get away from her. A giant spider scuttles by, pursuing nothing, pursued by nothing, and I turn to the Shee-lady and say, “Let me go.”

  “Strange,” she mutters, her voice li
ke a gentle song. “They’re so tiny, your flowers. Very, very, very tiny. I didn’t know tiny ones existed. Hey!” Her eyes light up like two purple moons. “Do you want to see some bigger flowers? I can show you!” She pulls out the arrow from her shoulder with the casualness of minding an itch. She doesn’t seem to notice the one still stuck in her head.

  “Please, no,” I beg her. “Please. I want to make sure my friends are okay. JOHN! HEL! SOMEONE! HELP!”

  The Shee-thing twists me with her many limbs until my face is close to hers, dangling upside-down, staring at her big, puffy lips as she says: “It’s only a day or two that way. Let me show you the size of my flowers, Winter!”

  She’s about to see the size of my fist and the depth at which my fingers can claw. I thrash around once more, like a child throwing an obnoxious tantrum, but she’s got me so firmly, I have no hope of breaking free. None. She is an expert; I have a suspicion she’s caught people before.

  “This one time,” she tells me excitedly, “I made this other friend. She kept trying to get away from me, too. I like to play a game where I pull my friends apart and then they have to crawl around and find all their body parts.”

  “JOHN! HELENA!”

  “I used to play it all by myself using my own parts,” she goes on, dreamily, “but this friend I’d made … she was different. She was able to bleed.”

  “GUNNER!! SOMEONE!”

  “I’d never met anyone before who could bleed. When I pulled her apart, she stopped moving.” The Shee-lady’s face draws close again, too close. “What does it mean when they stop moving?”

  “HELP!”

  “Your arm is smoking,” she remarks, a stray spider leg coming up to poke at it. It still stings and I’m feeling a strange dizziness consuming me. “My arms don’t smoke.”

  “H-Help,” I manage to get out, though it’s hardly audible. No one is around. I am helpless.

  Then her eyes flash happily, her mouth stretching into an enormous smile. “Let’s look at a big flower!”

  Despite my unheard screams, despite my kicking and my pummeling nothing-at-all with my secured fists, the Shee-spider-lady spreads her dragonfly wings and lifts off the ground. Letting me dangle now by her scorpion legs, which have an expert grip on me, I watch the city of Trenton fall away. The earth expands. The vast wastes and the Dead Woods. Shee-thing flies me over the wall, over the treetops, on and on into the oblivion of the world. She passes over a too-familiar cliff, nothing but mist lying miles below.