by Kate Danley
She desperately wished she could ask Matt what he thought, but at that moment, he was fighting for his life.
Matt had done pretty well with the first wave of attackers. They were average people with no weapons, and he managed to keep them a few feet at bay. But more kept crowding in, pinning him against the rock wall with no hope of escape.
Through the crush of bodies, Matt caught the briefest glimpse of Tanis, standing at the edge of the fissure. Like she was getting ready to jump.
Then, with sudden horror, he understood why.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Matt remembered Mr. Dark’s words, too.
And while they made terrifying sense, there had to be another way to stop Moloch. He wouldn’t let Tanis die. He tried to move towards her, but a strong hand got hold of his ax, and he knew it was too late, that he couldn’t free himself from the tangle of bodies converging on him.
He was finished.
Tanis had no idea if she could really save Matt by sacrificing herself.
Or Brett.
Or the rest of the world. But if there was even a chance, she had to try. Ever since she came back from the dead, she’d been living on borrowed time anyway. For all she knew, the only reason she’d been resurrected was to make this leap.
She faced the mountain and called out: “Moloch! I freely give my life to break the pact made by my ancestor.”
“Wait!” Brett yelled. “I don’t want you to die.”
She turned to him with a tiny flicker of hope. He sounded like the real Brett.
“You’re my family,” he said. “We’ll figure this out. Together.”
Tanis wanted it to be him, so badly. She wanted to believe that he was strong enough to overcome the evil power of Moloch and that she wouldn’t have to jump. He reached out a hand and gave her that familiar smile. “Come on, kiddo. Please.”
And that was when she knew she’d made the right decision.
Maybe his smile was too perfect, or his voice a little too desperate, but this wasn’t Brett. It was the yellow-eyed thing inside him trying to stop her from sacrificing her life.
Which meant it was going to work.
Matt struggled against the hands gripping his body, but there were simply too many. More latched on and they began to pull. Something tore in his shoulder. They were going to rip him apart.
He caught a glimpse of Tanis. Her eyes met his. She offered him a thin smile and then she stepped into the fissure.
And Tanis was gone.
An unearthly roar echoed across the island. At the same time, the Descendants crumpled to the ground, crying out in pain as their bodies radiated an intense golden light that seemed to burn its way out of their flesh.
Matt’s attackers let go and backed away from him.
On the dromon, the glyphs flared even more brightly, and the wood around them burst into flames, enveloping the ancient ship in fire.
The mountain of obsidian disintegrated into coarse black sand that poured down the rocky slopes, into the cracks in the earth, and to the water’s edge.
Moloch, or whatever had been summoned from the fiery depths of the earth, had been swallowed up again.
Matt looked up now into some very confused faces. He forced his way through the tightly packed crowd. They seemed to be struggling out of a deep sleep.
Brett, Wendy, and the other Descendants were on the ground. The light around their bodies had disappeared. The glow in her eyes was gone, too. Everything had gone. They were catatonic.
Matt went to the spot where he’d last seen Tanis. He ached with the loss and realized, for the first time, how close he’d actually become to her.
An old woman in a housedress approached Matt. Her bare feet were bloody, her eyes dazed. “I know this sounds crazy, but…where the hell are we? How did we get here?”
Matt shrugged, pretending to be just like the others. “I don’t know. I was going to ask you.”
He heard similar conversations all around them. Nobody knew how they’d gotten here or, as it turned out, how they were going to get back. They were a bunch of amnesiac castaways on a lost island in the middle of a vast sea.
It could have been worse, Matt thought.
# # #
The dromon burned steadily for the next few hours. Matt wasn’t sorry to see the ship destroyed, although it might have been nice to get one more ride first. He hoped that the smoke might attract the attention of a passing vessel, but nobody showed up to investigate.
Matt organized the castaways, taking a head count and distributing the limited supply of food and water that a few people had in their bags. They lit some small signal fires, again using whatever they happened to bring along, and whatever uncharred scraps of the dromon washed ashore, because there were no trees or anything else to burn on the island. It was all rock and sand, dredged up from the seafloor.
The catatonic Descendants, including Brett, wouldn’t eat or drink. They were totally lost. They began to die within the first day or two after the fall of Moloch. Matt felt bad for them, but in a way, he thought their fate was a blessing. He only knew about the bloodshed that Brett had caused, but if the others were responsible for similar acts of horrific violence, then they were probably better off this way, spared the pain of knowing all the death that they were responsible for while they’d been possessed with evil. And spared the legal consequences, too.
Matt and the others stripped the bodies of clothes, to use as kindling on the fires, and buried the corpses in the sand.
He was taking his shift keeping the signal fires lit when he became aware of someone beside him. The man wore a red shirt and white sailor’s cap. It was Gilligan from Gilligan’s Island.
“The Skipper and I used to fuck Ginger together.” It was Mr. Dark, of course, dressed as Gilligan. “Bet you didn’t know that.”
“What I know is that you wanted us to defeat Moloch,” Matt said. “You were afraid of the competition, weren’t you? That’s the second time I’ve seen you scared. It won’t be the last.”
“I just wanted to see if your little friend would kill herself. It was so nice of her to oblige, though I will miss her blow jobs. She was remarkably good at it. Shame you never got to find out. Now it’s just you and me again.”
Matt shook his head. “It never was just the two of us. There are others like me. Like Tanis. I’ll find them all and soon we’ll have an army.”
Mr. Dark smiled. “You’ll need more than that, Matty-boy.”
Now Matt smiled, thinking about the viral antidote to Mr. Dark’s touch that Mendelsohn was working on. “We will have it, too. Very soon, little buddy. I can’t wait to see your terror.”
Matt thought he detected a slight quiver in Mr. Dark’s chin. But the Dark Man quickly covered by becoming goofy Gilligan once again. “Oh, Skipper, that’s just coconuts!”
And with that, the Dark Man disappeared. It was almost as if he’d fled.
# # #
A Turkish cargo ship spotted them the next day and brought the survivors to port in Zonguldak. Nobody was ever able to find the island again or to come up with a credible explanation for how the people had ended up there.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Brighton, Idaho, Six Months Later
Matt was roaming across the country, working his way back towards the West Coast, when he stumbled on the Graham brothers in a local diner. Ken and Aaron Graham were both farmers and looked like they’d been decomposing under the hot sun for days. Flesh barely stuck to their bones. They were pure evil. Matt couldn’t just walk away from these two. So he got a handyman job on a poultry farm next to the Graham place and watched the brothers closely. They spent most of their time drunk. But late one night, when three of the Grahams’ rotting buddies showed up in a rust-eaten Impala, Matt decided to take a closer look.
They parked the Impala behind a barn far from the main house. Ken and little brother Aaron were waiting for them. They all gathered excitedly by the trunk, and when the driver popped it open, th
ere was a teenage girl tied up inside.
The girl barely moved as the young men lifted her from the trunk. Matt couldn’t tell if she was drugged or paralyzed with fear. He struck the biggest guy first, burying his ax in the man’s thickly muscled neck. Aaron came at him with a switchblade. Matt yanked the ax free and smashed the blunt end of the blade into the young man’s face.
He saw two of the men carrying the girl towards the barn but had to duck quickly as Ken threw a roundhouse punch at his jaw. The bare bones of the corpse’s arm whistled through the air past Matt’s face. His skull appeared to be grinning. This guy had clearly been decomposing for a very long time. Matt swung the ax into the top of Ken’s spine. The vertebra just above his collarbone shattered. He fell and Matt sliced into him again, severing what should have been his neck. Flesh started to rematerialize on the empty bones, an unsettling sight that Matt had no time to watch. When Aaron saw his brother fall, he yelled through his bloody, broken nose and charged at Matt with his knife clutched in one fist. He ran full speed into the ax, driving the blade into his own chest.
The big guy with the gaping neck wound suddenly slammed into Matt, knocking him forward into Aaron. The three men collapsed in a heap. Matt rolled to the side, trying to pull the ax with him. But the blade was wedged firmly in Aaron’s rib cage. A heavy boot caught Matt in the kidney. He grabbed the man’s foot and twisted, and the guy toppled over. Matt swiftly grabbed the switchblade from Aaron’s limp hand and stuck it in his opponent’s throat. He gurgled, then lay still. Matt stood, feeling a sharp twinge where he’d been kicked. With a few strong tugs, he dislodged his ax from Aaron’s now-dead body.
He hurried towards the barn. He could hear the horses inside whinnying and kicking their stalls furiously. They did not like what was going on in there. As he stepped through the door, Matt had to agree. Six figures in black robes and goat masks stood in a circle around the bound and blindfolded girl, chanting.
He didn’t see the seventh guy emerging from an open stall behind him, swinging a shovel at his head. The metal connected with his skull, sending Matt sprawling across the concrete floor. He grayed out for a moment and looked up just in time to see the shovel swinging down at him again. He moved just quickly enough to get a glancing blow on his ear instead of his forehead. Matt scrambled for his ax, feeling slow and clumsy. Something sharp plunged into his lower back, maybe a knife? Something heavy hit his shoulder, breaking bone. He swung the ax in wide arcs, trying to ward off attack. His vision kept doubling, making it look like there were twenty of those damn goat faces.
Then a body hit the floor beside him. Another one slammed against a wooden post, then collapsed. The masks were turning away from him, looking towards a new figure just visible among the black robes. It was a woman, Matt saw. Not the girl, but a dark-haired, fast-moving woman wielding what looked like…a claw hammer. She delivered a vicious blow to another goat man, and as he fell, Matt saw her face.
It was Tanis.
She grinned. “Welcome to the world of the undead.”
About the Authors
USA Today bestselling author Kate Danley began her career with the novel The Woodcutter (published by 47North). It was honored with the Garcia Award for the Best Fiction Book of the Year, the first place Fantasy Book in the Reader Views Literary Awards, and was the first place winner of the Sci-Fi/Fantasy category in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. Her other titles include Queen Mab, the Maggie MacKay: Magical Tracker series, and the O'Hare House Mysteries. Her plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, and DC Metro area. Her screenplay Fairy Blood won first place in the Breckenridge Festival of Film Screenwriting Competition in the Action/Adventure Category. She has over three hundred film, television, and theatre credits to her name, and specializes in sketch, improv, stand-up, and Shakespeare. She trained in on-camera puppetry with Mr. Snuffleupagus and played the head of a twenty-foot dinosaur on an NBC pilot. She lost on Hollywood Squares.
Phoef Sutton was born in Washington, DC. He attended James Madison University, where he acted in and wrote plays until they threw him out. He works in television where he has won two Emmys and a Golden Globe for the classic NBC show Cheers and a Peabody Award for ABC’s Boston Legal. Sutton lives in South Pasadena with his wife and two daughters. Reborn is his second Dead Man novel, following The Midnight Special. He’s also the author of the thriller Fifteen Minutes to Live.
Lisa Klink’s career has ranged from television to film to graphic novels—plus becoming a five-time Jeopardy! champion in her spare time. Beginning as a writer for Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, she’s gone on to contribute her substantial writing skills to Batman comics and Las Vegas resort attractions. Her work focuses on science fiction and action genres, with the occasional departure into romantic comedy. Reborn is her third Dead Man novel, following Slaves to Evil and Evil to Burn. Klink lives in Los Angeles and fills her day with aliens, holograms, psychics, and demigods.
Lee Goldberg is a two-time Edgar Award–nominated TV writer/producer and a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. His many books include the long-running Diagnosis Murder and Monk mysteries, The Walk, King City, Watch Me Die, and the international bestseller The Heist, which he co-wrote with Janet Evanovich. His numerous TV writing and producing credits include Diagnosis Murder, Monk, SeaQuest, Nero Wolfe, and The Glades. He's also worked as a consultant for TV networks and studios in Europe, Canada, and Sweden and has served on the Board of the Mystery Writers of America.
William Rabkin is a two-time Edgar Award nominee who writes the Psych series of novels and is the author of Writing the Pilot. He has consulted for studios in Canada, Germany, and Spain on television series production and teaches screenwriting at UCLA Extension. He is also an adjunct professor in UC Riverside’s low-residency master’s program.
This book was originally released in Episodes as a Kindle Serial. Kindle Serials launched in 2012 as a new way to experience serialized books. Kindle Serials allow readers to enjoy the story as the author creates it, purchasing once and receiving all existing Episodes immediately, followed by future Episodes as they are published. To find out more about Kindle Serials and to see the current selection of Serials titles, www.amazon.com/kindleserials.