by S. M. Reine
Its scream made his eardrums shake.
With a crack, the blades jammed. The harvester creaked and groaned, struggling to continue spinning.
Malcolm kicked his door open and jumped out.
The creature was thrashing, bleeding, trying to free itself. Malcolm ducked under its swiping arms, getting a better grip on Alsu’s kitchen knife. He kissed the hilt. “Please don’t break,” he said.
Malcolm drove the knife underneath the hybrid’s jaw.
One of its kicking legs connected with his gut, but Malcolm’s hold on the knife was too tight to let that force him back. Instead, he dragged the blade down its throat. Blood gushed over his hand, soaking his sleeve, splashing on his shirt.
He pulled the knife out, and cut again.
Another crack—and the harvester’s blades began to spin once more, with a belch of smoke that smelled like burning gasoline.
The hybrid wrenched free, missing half of one wing, and stumbled toward Malcolm with its hands clapped to its throat. It stumbled. Malcolm brought the knife hacking down on the back of its neck, and blade bit into bone.
The neck severed.
Even decapitated, the body continued to flail, swiping leathery hands through the grass—either searching for him, or for its own head. Malcolm kicked the head into the bushes.
Eventually, its legs stopped kicking. The harvester continued to whir.
Malcolm didn’t even realize that the hybrid had injured him until he was staggering back to Oymyakon. The side of his face was cold with blood—his blood. Malcolm gently probed his face for a wound and found a gash near his missing eye. One of its claws must have caught him when it punched an arm through the windshield.
He lifted the head, which he carried under one arm. “You asshole,” he told its vacant stare.
The boys were playing football again when he returned to the village. Malcolm gave a half-hearted wave to Timer before stepping into the kitchen.
Alsu was the only one of the nieces left, reading a book at the table. The oven filled the room with the smell of roasting meat.
Malcolm dropped the head on the table. “I brought you a present, you foxy thing,” he said.
Shock whitened her lips. “What is wrong with you?” Alsu snapped, tossing the book aside. She whipped her apron off and concealed the head with it.
“Thought your aunt might be interested in what I picked up in her backyard,” Malcolm said. “Now I’m going to fall down. Blood loss, you know.”
Alsu shoved the head, apron and all, into the chest freezer. “You can rest in the back bedroom. I’ve made it up for you.”
“The room Grandmother’s in?”
“She died,” Alsu said curtly. “My sisters are burying her now.”
“What? I was gone for an hour!” Malcolm stared around the house, expecting that someone would leap out and reveal the hidden cameras, but it didn’t happen, and Alsu wasn’t laughing.
Babushka couldn’t be dead. The boys were playing, dinner was cooking, so little time had passed.
“It was right on schedule,” Alsu said. “We’ve been preparing for her funeral all month. Now her room is empty, and it’s yours.”
“You people are fucking insane,” he said.
She shoved a hand towel against his bleeding eye socket. “I don’t have to let you rest here at all. And I wouldn’t if Grandmother hadn’t left instructions. Take the bed or the living room floor—it’s your choice.”
Malcolm briefly entertained the idea of finding a Union convoy and surrendering himself to their mercies again. They might have been assholes, but they were sane assholes. They didn’t schedule deaths and keep heads in their freezers.
His knees wobbled.
“I think I’ll rest right here,” he said, sitting down hard in one of the kitchen chairs.
Malcolm’s blood had soaked through the rag. Alsu gave him another, this one damp, and he wiped up his eye as best he could.
“Are we going to be attacked?” she asked. There wasn’t as much confidence in her voice as there had been earlier. Even if Babushka’s death had been scheduled, it seemed to have shaken Alsu—and thank fucking God for that, because Malcolm wouldn’t have known what to think if it hadn’t bothered her at least a little bit.
Malcolm tied the handkerchief around his head in lieu of an eye patch. “Do you have a phone?” he asked, instead of answering her question.
Alsu tossed a cell phone at him.
“I need to talk to my sisters,” she said. “Keep an eye on the oven.”
She left.
Malcolm had tucked the piece of paper with the phone number for the Faulkner house in his pocket before leaving Colorado. It took him a few tries to remember how to dial internationally, and several long moments of silence passed while he waited to be connected.
The phone finally rang. An answering machine picked up. “You’ve reached Leo Faulkner…”
He disconnected.
Although it was possible that nobody was in the house to hear the call, Malcolm was certain that James wasn’t in Colorado at all anymore. He had been taking Ariane and Hannah to the Haven. Maybe James had followed them in.
If James was out of reach, then there had to be someone else he could talk to. Hybrids were a big fucking deal—Malcolm had to tell someone what he had just killed.
Another phone number came to mind instantly. He dialed again.
It took just as long to connect, but it only rang twice before someone answered. “Leticia here,” responded a woman. She sounded stressed. A baby wailed in the background.
“Tish, hello! This is Malcolm Gallagher. How are the kids?”
“They’re good,” Leticia said cautiously. She probably didn’t remember him. Her husband had a lot of kopis friends, and Malcolm hadn’t visited the McIntyres in years.
There wasn’t time to explain at the moment. He barely let her finish before pushing on. “Right, I need to chat with Lucas. Pass me over?”
Leticia paused for so long that he almost thought that she had put him down to pick up the screaming baby. But the wails didn’t stop, and she finally said, “Who is this?”
“Malcolm Gallagher. I’m a—”
“I know what you are,” she said. “You can’t talk to Lucas.”
“It’s about Elise,” he said.
“Elise? Oh,” Leticia said. Her voice brightened a little. “What about her?”
“Just give me Lucas.”
“That’s the thing…” She trailed off. “Look, why don’t I take a message?”
A hand rapped on Malcolm’s arm. He turned, phone pressed to his shoulder, to find Alsu holding a shotgun beside him.
Babushka’s warning suddenly came to mind again. I will have my nieces slit your throat. The sight of her hands wrapped around the shotgun made his testicles shrivel.
Alsu shoved the gun into his hands.
“Intruders,” she said, pulling another knife from the belt of her dress. “Follow me.”
Malcolm scrambled to hang up. “I’ll take care of the intruders. You can stay inside,” he said, but Alsu ignored him.
Everyone was gathered outside the house, including Timer, his friend, and all of the withered old nieces. Each was armed with knives, makeshift bludgeons, and shotguns of their own. If they had been coming after Malcolm, he certainly would have been intimidated, but they didn’t stand a chance against more hybrids. Not a single fucking chance.
Two figures approached them on the road.
He stepped in front of the family. “Go inside,” he said, but they ignored him.
Malcolm braced the shotgun at his shoulder, taking aim. He watched down the barrel as the shapes grew closer and closer. They weren’t hybrids—they were too short, and there were no wings in sight.
As they grew closer, he realized that he recognized one of them.
Lowering the gun, he held out an arm to keep the others from shooting. “Wait, stop,” Malcolm said.
“Do you know these men?” Alsu a
sked, knuckles white on the handle of the butcher knife. Malcolm didn’t consider women of her age to be his type, but she seemed determined to kill, and it was a fetching look on her.
“Aye, I know them,” Malcolm said. He gave the shotgun to her. “Please, uh, don’t shoot me.”
He jogged out to meet the men.
Lucas McIntyre was getting fat in his old age. He must have been in his mid-twenties now—which was well beyond middle-aged for a kopis—and the extra weight layered over his muscles made him roughly the size and shape of a bear. His hair was buzzed to a bright blue mohawk. When he smiled, it stretched the holes of his lip piercings.
“Malcolm,” he greeted, clapping his hand on Malcolm’s forearm. Lucas’s grip was much like a bear’s, too. “You are ugly as fuck.”
“You too,” Malcolm said. He pushed the new scarf off of his face to bare the seeping eye socket. “Like it?”
“Looks great,” Lucas said.
“Bet that was fun getting through airport security.” Malcolm gestured at the piercings. “Speaking of which, you’ve got good timing. I was just trying to call you in as backup. How’d you know about the hybrids?”
“What? What hybrids are you talking about?” Lucas asked.
“You didn’t come here because of the angel-demon things?”
“Actually, we’re here because of a prophecy. Apparently the Union’s converging somewhere here.” Lucas waved vaguely at the hills.
Malcolm felt dizzy. The Event is here, he realized, much too late. The Event is fucking hybrids.
And he had walked right into it.
Lucas kept talking. “This is my trainee, Anthony Morales.”
Anthony was a dark-skinned guy in his early twenties with messy brown hair. The stock of a shotgun sheathed at his spine jutted over one shoulder. Aside from that, he carried one shoulder bag, too—that was all of the luggage between the two of them. He offered a hand to shake. Malcolm just stared at him.
“You all right?” Lucas asked. “Has it been bad here?”
With the crazy family still milling behind him on the road, a Union army on the way, and a hybrid’s head stuffed in the freezer, “bad” didn’t seem like a nearly adequate description of the situation.
“You could say that,” Malcolm said. “Let’s go inside and talk.”
The hybrid’s head steamed in the cool evening air, sitting out on the table behind Alsu’s house. A half hour packed in ice between steaks and ice cream hadn’t chilled it even one degree. It stared up at the sky with vacant eyes and a gaping mouth. If not for the fact that it had lacked a body for hours, Malcolm thought it might have looked like it was still fresh. Alive, even.
“Why are we out here?” Anthony asked. His eyes scanned the fields behind the house, as if wary of attack. “Can’t we look at this thing inside?”
“The women of the house told me ‘no more severed heads in the kitchen.’ If you want to argue with them, be my guest. Otherwise…” Malcolm poked the hybrid in the eye again, just to make sure that it was deader than it looked. It didn’t react, thankfully.
Lucas circled the table, tugging on the plug stretching his left earlobe. “What is it?”
“I think it’s a hybrid. A mix of angel and demon.”
“That’s not possible,” Lucas said. “The Treaty of Dis forbids it.”
“Yeah, the Treaty is kind of shattered,” Malcolm said. “Cool, right? So this is just the start of the party. And what were you saying about the Union?”
Anthony shrugged. “They’re coming here with an army. Benjamin Flynn said we had to be here, too. That’s all I know.”
Ah, shit. Malcolm really should have read those prophecies while he was still commander.
“What a coincidence. Elise is due to show up here at some point, too,” Malcolm said, tapping the nonexistent watch on his wrist. “James asked me to pick her up out in some harmless field filled with prancing, adorable cows. That’s where I ran into this guy.”
Lucas and Anthony exchanged looks.
“Hybrids, Elise, and the Union,” Anthony said.
Malcolm clapped his hands together. “Right! So, now we’re all up to speed. You handsome gentlemen have this covered, eh? Tell Elise I said hi. I’m going to find a bunker where I can ride out the apocalypse.”
“No,” Lucas said. “We’ll need you here.”
“No? No?”
“No,” he repeated, more firmly this time. “We’ve got maybe two days until everything falls apart. There’s not enough time to call in backup. And if there are more of those around, we can’t let them leave here alive.”
“I’m not worried about hybrids,” Malcolm said. “I’m worried about the Union.”
Lucas snorted. “Can you really leave when something is about to go down?”
The ridiculous, heroic kopis instincts inside of Malcolm said no. But out loud, he said, “Hell yes I can.”
Anthony rolled his eyes and walked away.
“Why are you even here, Malcolm?” Lucas asked, lowering his voice. “If you’re so eager to get away, why come in the first place?”
“Because I’m an idiot,” Malcolm said. “I owe James Faulkner a favor. He asked me to get Elise. I thought, how bad can it be? Turns out, very bad. And here we are.” He dropped his hand on top of the hybrid’s head, ruffling its blood-caked hair.
It started screaming.
He jerked his hand back and jumped away.
“Jesus fucking Christ!”
Malcolm’s exclamation was still quieter than the shrieks of the hybrid. Somehow, without lungs, it was as loud as an air raid siren.
Lucas clapped his hands over his ears. “Shut that thing up!”
Malcolm ripped the bandana off of his eye and stuffed it into the hybrid’s mouth. It kept screaming anyway, long and loud and wordless.
Anthony came sprinting back, shotgun in his arms and panic in his eyes. “How many days did you say we had until shit got bad?” he yelled, trying to be heard over the hybrid. “Two? Maybe three?”
Dark figures rose from the forest far beyond him. There was no mistaking them for birds.
Malcolm knew, with nauseating certainty, that those creatures were rising from the meadow.
“Shit,” he said, picking Alsu’s shotgun up again. “We’ve got to get the villagers to safety.”
Anthony nodded sharply. “On it.”
He ran off again, and Lucas drew a pair of pistols from his hip holsters, which were set for a cross-draw. “I need to load,” he said. “Cover me.”
The hybrids hurtled toward the air, making a beeline for Oymyakon. A hysterical laugh bubbled out of Malcolm’s throat. Cover him? Against three—no, wait, four hybrids?
“Sure, I’ll do that,” he said, tracking the flight of the hybrids across the bright sky with the shotgun’s sight.
They were moving fast. Just seconds away.
“So I get that you only came here because James asked you to,” Lucas said, slipping a few rounds into a magazine. He sounded pretty chill, considering that the head was still screaming. “Cool. Great. But that still leaves us with a pretty big question.”
“What’s that?”
Lucas slammed the magazine into his pistol. “Where the hell is James now?”
IX
Limbo was a nothing-place.
The ground and air were indistinguishable from one another—vast gray plains with a single dividing line that implied a horizon. The landscape had no remarkable features. It was flatter than the plains of the Midwest, without any bumps worth tripping over.
The only hint of life within was a lone man, stumbling toward gray nothingness, emerging from gray nothingness. James Faulkner had been walking through it for a long time. If there were anything to find in Limbo, after an eternity of searching, he would have found it.
Yet he had seen everything that there was to be found, which was to say, nothing at all. There were no sounds to reach his ears, no flavors on his tongue, not even scents in his nose. He shoul
d have been able to pick up the odor of rot, if nothing else, since he was still smeared with Malebolge’s effluence. He had no water with which to wash himself.
Without any senses, James felt like he had become as much of a nothing as the timeless world around him.
But there must have been some kind of time passing, even if it didn’t touch his clothing. The magical burns had healed neatly, leaving behind smooth skin. Out of boredom, he had ignited a few more of the spells, and those had healed, too. The magic itself did nothing in Limbo beyond stinging his skin for a fleeting second. He was powerless.
He had no clue how long he had stumbled through the vast wasteland of Limbo.
But eventually, he couldn’t handle it anymore. The running. The boredom. The constant, gnawing hunger.
All he wanted to do was die. But that wasn’t an option—no more than finding water to slake his terrible thirst. James couldn’t even remember what water tasted like.
He collapsed. It wasn’t the first time. Dear God, it wouldn’t be the last time.
James was never going to escape.
But this time, as he lay suspended in the gray nothing of Limbo, he could find no desire to get up again.
A pair of boots crossed in front of him. James’s eyes tracked up a pair of legs to a very familiar face.
Elise stood over him, arms folded, hip jutted, judgment in her eyes. Her hair hung over one shoulder in a thick braid. A smattering of freckles covered her cheekbones. A white tank top hugged her torso, with a gap between its hem and the studded belt of her jeans that bared the vee of muscle slanting over her hips. Her combat boots were as muddy as if she, too, had been slogging through Hell.
It wasn’t Elise as a demon, or even the woman that he had eventually come to love. It was Elise as a sixteen-year-old girl, full of hard edges and attitude. She was untouched by the washed-out light of Limbo. Young and vibrant, but not alive.
She was a ghost.
“What are you doing down there?” she asked, her voice flat.
“Elise,” he croaked. His lips cracked with the motion. It didn’t hurt, but he tasted salt and iron on his tongue. “It’s you.”