by Dan Wells
“Immortal,” said Ostler, “but only because she gives her death away, over and over and over.”
“What does this mean?” asked Kelly. “Now that we know how she works, can we move on her?”
“We move immediately,” said Potash. “She works afternoon shifts this week; surveillance suggests she’ll be at home right now, sealed off from the rest of the world, which we now know to be a defensive tactic against germs. She’ll be at her weakest, and she’ll be isolated. We leave in fifteen minutes.”
“I want heavy protocols on this,” said Ostler, though everyone was already moving, collecting the others and gathering equipment for the attack. “Cleaver on the street out front, Lucas positioned behind the house with her rifle, Potash and Ishida at the front door.” She looked at me. “We don’t need you to verify a trance, like with Cody French, and Ishida has more combat experience. You’re sure Mary Gardner won’t hulk out or grow claws or … anything like that?”
“She’ll have a gun,” I said, “but that’s it. Worst-case scenario she gives us pneumonia or something, but none of us are children with compromised immune systems, so we should be fine. We ought to hit the hospital after, though, and chug vitamins like a sewer worker, but we should be fine.”
“Pray that you are,” said Ostler. “No matter how much you think you know, never forget that these are demons.”
“I thought you didn’t like that word.”
“I don’t like killing, either,” said Ostler, “but we do what we have to do.”
* * *
Kelly drove again, and I sat in the back seat, breathing deeply, counting out my number pattern: one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one. We were on our way to kill again—we were on our way for Potash to kill again. They made me plan it and they made me watch, but they never let me have that moment.
Kelly Ishida had her hair up in a ponytail, showing the back of her neck through the gap between her seat and her headrest. I could see the bumps of her spine pressing up under the skin, see the tiny wisps of black hair too small to get tied up in the ponytail. The subtle imperfections in her skin, the pores and follicles and one pale chicken-pox scar at the base of her hairline. I would stab her right there, just beneath the scar, between the two tendons connecting the skull to the collarbone. Sever the spinal column with a single strike. If I did it right now, while her eyes were on the road, she wouldn’t even know what I was doing until it was too late.
Thirty-four, fifty-five, eighty-nine, one hundred forty-four, two hundred thirty-three.
“What else have we figured out about Meshara?” asked Potash. “If they’re working together, he might be at her house. We still don’t know what he can do.”
“He ‘remembers,’” said Diana. “Trujillo spent all night with Brooke, but that’s all he got. I didn’t know you could remember someone to death, but that’s what I love about this job.”
“Wait,” I said, “was Nathan alone last night? Why does Nathan get to be alone and I have to live with Potash?”
“Our surveillance has never placed Mary Gardner and Meshara together,” said Kelly, ignoring me. “I went through as many of our old photos and videos as I could last night, and he’s not in any of them.”
“Maybe they know we’re watching Mary,” said Diana, “so they’re staying out of the way to hide themselves.”
“That could mean this is an ambush,” said Potash.
“We need backup,” said Kelly.
“We don’t have backup,” said Diana. “Even if we called the local police, we couldn’t brief them in time to be helpful, and once they knew everything we wouldn’t be able operate freely in the city.”
“Then we make do with what we have,” said Potash, turning from the front seat to hand me something. “Take this.”
It was a gun.
I stared at it, not moving an inch.
Potash jiggled the gun, prompting me again to take it. “Have you ever used a gun before?”
“Once,” I said, but it wasn’t what they were thinking. The only shot I’d ever fired was a hole in the top of my car, to pour a can of gas on Brooke’s head and burn her. I didn’t touch his gun, considering this other idea instead. “We could light her house on fire.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Kelly.
“Is it?” asked Diana. “If it gets the job done…”
“We can’t just light a criminal’s house on fire,” said Kelly, “that’s against every—”
“She’s not a criminal,” I said quickly. “She’s a monster. Our job is to kill her by any means necessary, and if that means burning her house down then we burn it down, and it’s not against any laws or regulations because our entire team is operating beyond the law. We do whatever it takes to get the job done.”
“This isn’t the only job we have to get done,” said Potash. “We have at least one more Withered to take care of in this city, and an attack as visible as a house fire will make it almost impossible to act. Diana’s right about the police—if they know what we’re doing, if they know we’re here at all—”
“Drop me off here and I’ll walk the rest of the way,” I said, feeling more desperate than I expected at the prospect of lighting a major fire. I lit small ones now and then, when I could get away from the rest of the team, but a whole house … I felt short of breath. “I can get into the yard without anyone seeing me, and no will ever know we’re the ones who set it—”
“Even if you can,” said Kelly, “we can’t guarantee she won’t get out before it burns. She’s not incapacitated like Cody French was, she’s just taking the morning off from work. We’d have to station Diana outside to pick her off when she runs, and at that point we’re just doing the same thing we always do, just way more publicly.”
“It was a good idea,” said Diana, patting my leg. “Maybe on another project.” I wanted to shove her hand away, but I knew it was overemotional. Three minutes ago I hadn’t even thought about a fire, and now I wanted it so bad I could already smell the smoke. Three hundred seventy-seven, six hundred ten, nine hundred eight-seven, fifteen hundred ninety-seven.
Potash offered the gun again. “You said you’ve used one once. Are you comfortable using one again?”
“Not really,” I said. My breath was only slowly returning to normal. “I don’t want to shoot you by accident.” Though if you don’t get out of my house soon I might want to shoot you on purpose. I paused again, collecting myself. “Do you have a knife?”
He shared a quick glance with Kelly and holstered his gun. “Can you use a knife?”
“I’ve been cutting open corpses since I was ten,” I said, exaggerating only slightly.
“But in combat?” he asked. “With a Withered?”
“Do your job and I won’t have to,” I said. “If the plan goes to hell, better a knife than nothing.”
He pulled a combat knife from some hidden fold of his jacket; it was about ten inches long and wrapped in a nylon sheath. I opened the snaps that held it in place and pulled the blade about halfway out; it was five, maybe six inches of the total length, stainless steel with a nonreflective coating. I ran my finger along the groove in the side of the metal: a blood gutter, so the knife wouldn’t get caught by the suction of a deep wound. I slid it back in, snapped the sheath closed, and tucked the whole thing into the pocket of my heavy winter coat.
“It’s right up here,” said Kelly. “We’ve staked this place out before, so you all know the layout, and we’ve practiced so you all know the drill. Radio silence. Diana, this is your stop. We’ll give you five minutes.” She pulled over in front of a plain beige house behind Mary Gardner’s, and Diana got out with her unmarked duffel bag. The neighbors were gone during the day, but we’d already duplicated their key, and Diana was inside before we’d even turned the corner at the end of the block. She would wait at the top bedroom window with her rifle, to stop Gardner from escaping out the back.
Potash screwed a suppressor onto the end of his gun—
not the one he’d offered me, I noticed, which meant he had at least two. Who knew how many he was carrying? I wondered if he really did have more than one at my house and where he hid them.
Mind on the job. Kelly would follow him in and wait by the front door, cutting off the other exit. My role was to stay in the car and hope nothing went wrong. I touched the hilt of the combat knife and tried to convince myself that “nothing” was what I really wanted.
The street was quiet, with most people gone for the day to school or work. There’d be a few homemakers around, but they wouldn’t see anything. Kelly parked across the street from Mary’s house and left me the car keys as we traded seats. I put my hands on the wheel, gripping it tightly to help stabilize my shaking. Kelly and Potash did a final check of their weapons, hid them in their coats, and got out of the car. I watched them walk to the front door, pull out a duplicated key, and let themselves in. It was 10:26 in the morning. They closed the door behind them.
I waited.
Ostler insisted on a communications blackout during every project. Maybe she was worried about people overhearing us? If Meshara and whoever else was with him had radios of their own, they could listen in and warn Mary we were coming, so the rule made sense, but that didn’t make it any easier to sit in the car and wonder what was happening. I listened for the sound of Potash’s gun—even with a suppressor it would make a loud thump, like a pneumatic staple gun. Any people sitting in one of these houses might not notice it at all, but I was waiting for it and I—
The sound that came was a full gunshot, unsuppressed. That meant it wasn’t Potash, and that meant something had gone very wrong. Was it Kelly or Mary? I sat up straighter, staring across the street at the now-silent house. There was a small circle in the bedroom window, up on the second floor; I peered at it closer, almost certain that it was a bullet hole. I couldn’t tell for sure at that distance. I looked at the other windows, at the front door, at anything and everything hoping desperately to see some sign of what was going on. Our radio silence ended when the Withered was dead; they could call me then, like we’d called Kelly when we’d killed Cody French. I clutched my radio in my hand, my knuckles white, but it didn’t make a sound.
A curtain moved in the bedroom window—a sudden bulge, like it was being pressed against the glass from the inside. It moved to the side, then fell back to hang normally again. Was someone struggling, or was it just a current of air? I clutched my knife, wondering what to do.
I got out of the car and walked across the street.
The front yard was covered in snow, and a narrow path was shoveled along the walk. The steps to the porch were painted concrete, crusted with a scattered layer of rock salt. I put a hand to the door, wary, wondering if I should pull my knife out now, to be ready, or if it was better to wait until I was out of view of the street. Someone had to have heard the shot; surely the neighbors were watching me now. I pretended to knock, making no noise but trying to give the visual impression that I wasn’t a part of this, that I was just an innocent bystander. I waited, listening, and heard a low crash, like someone had broken a vase or a window somewhere deep in the house. I put my hand on the doorknob, turned it, and went inside.
The front door led into a narrow hallway papered in a floral pink. A hat rack and umbrella stand stood nearby, and beyond them I glimpsed a small living room that seemed almost Victorian: ornate wooden furniture upholstered with thick, embroidered cushions. The lamp on a small corner table was hung with fringe. The effect was classy but threadbare, the kind of furniture you might see in the home of a ninety-year-old woman. Mary, of course, was much older. I supposed she’d had this furniture since it was first made, over a century ago.
I heard another crash, maybe upstairs, and pulled the combat knife from my pocket. I stayed as silent as I could, not wanting to alert Mary to a third enemy in her house. I was not a trained fighter, so if I was going to have any meaningful effect on this situation, surprise would be a far more effective weapon than the knife ever could. I unsnapped the sheath and revealed the black blade, holding it in front of me in an upside-down grip, point toward the floor. Another crash, and a grunt. Definitely upstairs, and somehow recognizably feminine. Kelly, or Mary? Where was Potash? I tried the first step, found that it didn’t squeak, and slowly shifted my weight to the second, then the third. The ceiling thumped, somewhere to my right, like something heavy had fallen—heavy but soft; not a piece of furniture, but a body. I moved to the fourth step and, hearing the faintest trace of a creak as I started to place my weight on it, quickly picked up my foot to stop the sound. I tried the other side of the step, slowly and carefully, and when it stayed silent I moved to the next. The thump upstairs was followed by a scrape, then a pause, then a sudden flurry of footsteps. I moved to the sixth stair. The seventh. I was halfway up.
A window shattered above and behind me, loud and bright, and after a moment of shock I raced back down and threw open the front door, cursing myself for leaving an exit unguarded—if Mary had jumped out a front window she could run for safety, on the wrong side of the building for Diana to stop her. I saw a foot, sprawled in the snow, and stepped out for a better look. Kelly was facedown on the white lawn, her left side covered with blood, her head bent at an impossible angle. Her spine must have been snapped nearly in half, though whether it was from the fall or the fight itself I didn’t know. She hadn’t screamed, during or even before the fall.
Mary Gardner was more deadly than we’d ever imagined, and now the whole neighborhood knew we were here—and yet I froze, staring at Kelly’s twisted body like I was in a trance. Her broken shape in the snow was curled beautifully, like a flower, her arms splayed out like the tendrils of a dark black fern. Black and gray, with drops of bright red blood melting deep pink pockets in the snow. Her hair billowed around her head like she was a mermaid in a pale white sea, frozen in a moment of single, perfect beauty. I took a step toward it, then a few more. I was halfway down the stairs from the porch before the sound of another crash echoed down from upstairs. Potash was still up there, and the fight was still going. I took another step forward. How many times had I imagined Kelly dead, and now here she was, right in front of me. The Withered disintegrated when they died; I hadn’t touched a body in months. I reached out to it—and saw the knife in my hand.
A knife. Mary Gardner was still upstairs. I looked up at the window, then back at the door.
Then back at the body, still as a photograph.
Another crash. Mary was killing Potash—I didn’t know how, but the process sounded brutal. My only advantage was that she didn’t know I was there. This was what I needed—to work alone, without anyone knowing where or who I was. Even if the neighbors knew about Kelly, Mary didn’t know about me; someone might call the police, but I had a few minutes to salvage this kill. To do it myself. I gripped my knife tighter and slipped back inside, quietly locking the door behind me. I took the stairs faster this time, knowing which spots to avoid. The walls of the second floor hallway were covered in the same pink wallpaper as the first, though it was brighter here, where the sun hadn’t reached it to fade out the color. The crash had come from … there. That was almost certainly the room Kelly had fallen out of. The door was open, though I couldn’t see anything from my vantage point, and whatever was inside the room couldn’t see me. I listened and heard heavy, labored breathing.
“You’ve ruined everything,” said a woman’s voice. She had the hushed, clipped tones of a person barely controlling her fury. “Do you think I can stay here now? What am I supposed to say when the police come? That the man who attacked me had pneumonia so bad he couldn’t even walk? Who’s going to believe that?”
More labored breathing, and a loud crash, like someone had smashed a vase or a lamp. I crept closer to the door.
“People are going to ask questions,” said the woman, and I heard another crash. The gasping breather grunted, only to succumb to a fit of coughing so bad he might have been vomiting. I wondered how her sickness-
shunting power worked—if she had some way of increasing the intensity. An ancient goddess of plagues, amping up a common cold until it destroyed a grown man’s lungs in minutes. “Some of the parents are already suspicious, they have been for years, and now you come in and add more fuel to the fire. ‘Nurse Gardner killed my daughter! She’s a vector of disease; she’s Typhoid Mary!’” Another crash. I stood by the edge of the door, my back pressed against the wall, the knife raised to my chest so I could strike out in a split second if I had to. Maybe I already had to; I couldn’t think clearly. I wanted to attack her, to stab her and twist the knife and feel her hot blood pumping out on my hand—but for that very reason I knew that I shouldn’t. There was a threshold here, and I didn’t dare to cross it. Potash grunted again, like he was trying to speak, but his voice was nothing but a broken wheeze, so painful it made me cringe just to hear it.
“I wanted to leave you for Rack,” said Mary. I heard a click of what could only be a gun, and I knew I couldn’t wait any longer. I gripped the knife tighter, screaming silently at myself to stay and go at the same time. “You deserve a death so much worse than I can—”
I swung around the doorjamb, saw Mary Gardner’s back as she stood over Potash’s body, and plunged my knife in with a strangled shout. It was exactly like I’d dreamed it: a sudden slowing as the blade met flesh, the metal sinking into the meat, glancing off a bone, jarring my hand like a thrill of pleasure. She stiffened and screamed, hanging for a moment in midair before her strength disappeared and she started to collapse. The weight of her body fought against my grip on the knife, but I grit my teeth and held my hand firm, and the body slid off with a slow, bloody slurp.
I’d killed her.
She landed in a lifeless heap, and I felt a sickening rush, like water flowing into a void. All that work, all that waiting, all that planning and dreaming and imagining what it would be like, and … that was it? My peripheral vision seemed to disappear, tunneling in on this one single body. I dropped to my knees, reaching out my left hand to touch her back, but shying away at the last moment. Her pale blue nurse’s shirt was slowly turning red as her blood spread across it. Should I roll her over? Should I see her face? Should I say something or do something or punch her or bite her or—