by Chuck Wendig
Praise for Chuck Wendig’s Blackbirds
“Fast, ferocious, sharp as a switchblade and fucking fantastic”
Lauren Beukes, author of Zoo City and The Shining Girls
"Think Six Feet Under co-written by Stephen King and Chuck Palahniuk... Wendig's surefooted prose means that this ride is well worth sticking your thumb out for."
SFX Magazine
“Visceral and often brutal, this tale vibrates with emotional rawness that helps to paint a bleak, unrelenting picture of life on the edge.”
Publishers Weekly
“Balls-to-the-wall, take-no-prisoners storytelling at its best.”
Bill Cameron, author of County Line
“Wendig is one of those rare authors with such masterful use of language, and such a good ear for dialogue, that he engages the reader from the first page and never lets go.”
British Fantasy Society
Praise for Chuck Wendig’s Zer0es
“This taut thriller will reinforce your paranoia about big government, big data, and that big, nerdy barista who just seems to know too much.”
Wall Street Journal
“[A] high-octane blend of nervy characters, dark humor and bristling dialogue... smart, timely, electrifying.”
NPR
“Highly cinematic.”
Library Journal
“With complex characters and feverishly paced action, ZEROES is a sci-fi thriller that won’t stop blowing your mind until the last page. ... It left me rooting for the hackers!”
Daniel H. Wilson, bestselling author of Robopocalypse
“ZERØES turns ones and zeroes into pure gold - Wendig hacks the action thriller.”
Scott Sigler, New York Times bestselling author
“A sci-fi surveillance thriller with a twisted heart of creepy horror. It grabs you by the throat on page one, and never lets go.”
Ramez Naam, author of The Nexus Trilogy
“A Matrix-y bit of old-school cyberpunk updated to meet the frightening technology of the modern age...An ambitious, bleeding-edge piece of speculative fiction that combines hacker lore, wet-wired horror, and contemporary paranoia in a propulsive adventure that’s bound to keep readers on their toes.”
Kirkus Reviews
By the Same Author
The Miriam Black series
Blackbirds
Mockingbird
The Cormorant
Thunderbird (2016)
Raptor & Wren (2017)
Vultures (2018
The Heartland Trilogy
Under the Empyrean Sky
Blightborn
The Harvest
The Atlanta Burns books
Atlanta Burns
Atlanta Burns: The Hunt
Star Wars
Star Wars: Aftermath
Star Wars: Aftermath – Life Debt (2016)
Zer0es
Myrmidon (2016)
Double Dead
Unclean Spirits
The Kick-Ass Writer (non-fiction)
The Hellsblood Bride
Mookie Pearl, Book 2
Chuck Wendig
Copyright © Chuck Wendig 2015
terribleminds.com
Chuck Wendig asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
0
The man walked away from the firelight, naked as the day he was born, and he offered himself to the Thousand Worms, and they dragged him down through shattered, crumbling karst and into the deepest dark where he fell into mud that stank of minerals and rot, and there in the slurry they coupled with him. He, the last King of Man, he the Ruler of the Lamites, gave his seed to them and in turn was given great riches. But unlike the other Kings and Queens and Satraps and Empresses who had bonded with the God-Worms, this King’s seed was a trap. His child like all the daemons was one of half-dark and half-light—a child equally split between Above and Below. Human blood and hungry shadow. But this child, a child of wood and wine, was given a task by her mother, the Queen—a task to unite the other seven children, the other daemons, and to work together to banish the Hungry Ones down into the secret places below the earthen mantle. Before now the god-worms had free rein of all worlds but the daemon children’s magic—magic born of the Thousand Worms’ own blood—cut the worlds apart as if by an axe. The two, disconnected, with man serving the Light and the Above, and the monsters serving the Dark and the Below. But the god-worms hunger again to be free. They long to turn and twist in the warm light of the sun. They long once more to reclaim the world they lost.
And one day soon, they shall.
Above as Below. Below as Above.
— from the Histories and Mysteries of the Riven Worlds, by John Atticus Oakes
PART ONE
MOOKIE
1
Whenever I got grounded for doing something stupid, I always found a way out. Mom thought she was being a hardass and that she could control me but she couldn’t. (Nobody could, let’s be honest.) Sometimes I convinced her I needed to go out for some reason—I needed a book at the library, I had to meet a study partner, I had some extracurricular activity. And if that didn’t work, if she smelled the bullshit sure as you could smell beer on breath or cigarettes on wallpaper, I’d just jimmy open my window and go out the fire escape. I always had a way out. But now I’m down here in the dark, not really dead, not really alive. I still haven’t found my exit. But I’m gonna.
Just you wait and see.
— from the journals of Eleanor Jessamyne Pearl, Living Dead Girl
*
Lacey Aces skates like a motherfucker.
The hard hot-pink wheels of her Riedell pro-line skates clatter and clop on the cold concrete of the factory floor. The big-ass book sits heavy in the backpack slung over her shoulder. Heavy not just with weight. But heavy with potential.
It’ll earn her big. A fat sack of cash. A way out of this city. A way forward with her life, with her dreams. This city’s gone sour, anyway—spoiled like milk left out of the fridge, rotten like meat, ruined like the sugar factory the rusted bones of which rise up all around her. So piss on it, hell with it. Slap her ass and kiss the tip of her middle finger and see this whole damn town in her rearview.
Ahead is life. Behind is death.
Skate fast: escape. Skate slow: get dead.
Gibbers and howls echo. She hears a mad cackle that’s half a drugged-out ecstatic bliss and half a thing held fast in a crushing grip. Pleasure and pain, squawked and guffawed. These fuckos are three chimps short of a circus, the whole lot of them. She thought she was robbing another gang but they ain’t no gang, hombre. They’re a full-blown crazy-eights cuckoo-town cult: red leather body suits and gimp masks with zipper mouths. Altars and cages and weapons that look like something you’d see used by a Civil War gynecologist—something to open you up, scoop you out, stitch you shut. It’s not just how they look or what they surround themselves with: it’s the way th
ey are. That kind of wide-eyed zeal and howl-mouthed fervor tells her all she needs to know.
Her pursuers are believers.
She knew the city was thick with new gangs—with Zoladski gone and his line clipped short like the dingle-dangles of a gelding, the whole place became a goddamn vacuum and vacuums have a nasty habit of sucking up everything and everyone. Foomp. Big fish, little fish, East Coast, West Coast, mafia, tongs, cartels, Nazis. The Cazadores, the Rankin clan, the Abbadelli family. Plus all the old gang remnants: the Lantern Jacks and the Black Sleeves joined forces. So did the Devil Bitches and the Bowery Sisters.
The coalition was dead. The Organization broke apart like a saltine cracker. Death in the streets. Like blood filling grout lines.
But now she knows: it’s not just the gangs that stepped into the void.
It’s cults, too.
Like these mondo bizarro cray-cray whack-stains. What do they call themselves? The Skinless. What the hell does that mean, anyway?
Lacey is about to find out.
She skates hard past fat concrete posts. Metal beams hang above her head like the rusted ribs of some giant industrial robot. The air stinks: a burned sugar tang coupled with a sour mash smell. Sweetness gone south. Fermentation and fruit.
Then, ahead—a shape darker than the shadows darts across her path. From between one pair of rusted blue vats to another.
She thought they were behind her.
A cold realization: they’re ahead of her, too.
One comes shrieking out of the darkness, arms pinwheeling, mouth yawning wide from behind an open zipper in its mask—she sees bold white teeth and white eyes and the red of its leather. Lacey moves without thinking—her hand already at her belt, a flick of the wrist. The shine of a throwing knife cutting the dark.
The cultist squeaks like a stepped-on rat, his head snapping back with a knife buried to the hilt in his eye. His heels skid out from under him. The back of his head bangs against a vat as he drops.
All that sound, all that clamor—
She shouldn’t be paying attention.
But she does. Hard not to.
As she passes by, she sees the leather-clad cultist’s mouth. Jaw cranking wide. His head shudders. His neck pulses.
As if something is struggling to get out.
What the hell am I looking at?
The wrong thing, as it turns out. She should be eyes-forward. She knows that—a half-second before the length of iron rebar swings for her head. She has enough time to flinch away, take the blow on her shoulder. Pain pops like a cork and her skates go sideways as she starts to topple.
But this isn’t Lacey’s first roller rodeo—she’s a pro. A jammer: her job to stay on her feet, lap the other skaters. She rebalances. Puts herself into a spin. The world spins with her, drunk and loose, oil on water, but somehow she stays on her wheels.
She pivots, skates, tries to ignore the pain. Behind her: footsteps. Faster than she would think. Wetter, too, which she doesn’t understand—slap slap slap. Something’s not right, here. She reaches behind her, darts a trio of fingers into the back pocket of her jeans, finds there a little lipstick tube—
Cerulean. Peacock powder. The Big Blue.
Time to Blaze.
She pops the cap, gives the bottom a quick screw-turn—
Dots each of her temples with the stick—
Everything goes goofy for a few seconds. The world gone extra-wobbly as the curtain parts, as all the illusions slide off the wall like unmoored paintings. Darkness goes bright. Her limbs feel disconnected. Vertigo. Gravity loss. The hairs on her neck tingle and her pink mohawk feels like a high-voltage Jacob’s ladder, all buzzy bzzt and electric vvvvt as the Blue does its job, charging through her like a shark through a shipwreck, all clean teeth and black eyes—
It snaps on. Everything is smooth. No panic. All clear.
Then, ahead, she sees them. More cultists. More Skinless.
And suddenly she realizes why they’ve earned that name.
They’re not wearing red leather.
They’re not wearing anything.
Including skin.
They’re wet. Glistening. She sees the topography of tendons and muscles. Bodies like skeletons packed with raw steak. Fiber and flesh out of its swaddling.
They’re screaming now. Running full-tilt boogie. She sees shapes writhing there in the holes of their mouths, the hollows of their throats. Like fingers wiggling. Like squid tentacles reaching—
She brakes, skids. The Skinless that had been chasing her is on her now, but she’s ready for him—she throws up a hard elbow, which connects. She feels the dull crunch reverberate up through her arm. Something lands on the ground, and she realizes in sudden horror, it’s his jaw, oh god, what—
The Skinless ululates through his throathole as something like a hand reaches out of its ruined mouth and grabs hold. A cold pain lances through her.
She screams as it grabs her and bites.
No time. With her good arm she grabs another knife off her belt and stitches it across the thing’s face a handful of times—punch punch punch—and then there’s a squit of blood and the tentacle-fingers let go and the Skinless drops like a rolled-up carpet.
Cultists. From both directions.
Nowhere to go.
She skates.
Arms pistoning. Legs pumping. A Skinless leaps through the dark—her second-to-last knife embeds in his throat and he pirouettes in mid-air, gurgling, landing just past her as she hurtles forth. She slams hard into one of the vats—it resonates like a gong. Already she’s reaching up, finding a finger hold. Clambering to the top. Skinless smash into the vat, too, and suddenly it’s all red, flailing limbs. She kicks out with her skate, catches one in the face, sends him (or her? does it even matter?) backward.
And then she’s up.
These vats—they were for sugar, once, right? She doesn’t know if they were for evaporation or for filtration or what, but what she does know is that they aren’t open-air. They’ve got a hatch. She gives it a spin—
Or, rather, tries to. It doesn’t budge. Rusted shut.
No no no, please, not now—
Skinless scramble up over the edge. Too late.
She stands. Thrusts out with a knee. Knocks one Skinless pinwheeling over the edge, all white teeth and white eyes and red skin and squiddy mouth—
Lacey takes the opportunity. She leaps through the gap. From the top of one vat to the next. But the cultists, they see what she’s doing. They anticipate. Get ahead of her.
So she reaches up to the metal beams. Pulls herself up.
The Blue brightens everything. It doesn’t shine a light so much as it pushes back darkness. And so she can see: across the way, just ten feet over, are more vats.
And one of them is already open.
She can stand here. She can skate. She moves. Wheels grinding on old metal. Skinless already up and after her. Like ants covering an old popsicle stick. Pawing and crawling and dangling. They bark sharp, punctuated shrieks. Below her they mumble and babble—tongueless and mad.
One grabs her bag—starts to wrench it off her shoulders, which wrenches her off the beam. She catches it with the crook of her wounded arm and it only whets the pain that cuts into her, but what choice does she have? She needs this book and she needs this life and she can’t let a fucked-up arm get in her way.
The Skinless pulling on the bag leans down on the beam, tugging and wrenching. The cultist smells. At first she can’t think of what the smell reminds her of, but then it hits her: ground beef. The smell on your hands after you mold a couple burgers.
She buries her last knife in the side of its head. Crunch.
Then, back onto the beam as the other blood-slick freaks gather beneath her and behind her. She gets up, uses the toe of her skate to push off—
Lacey jumps, lands on the edge of the vat. The air goes out of her. But no time to deal with that. She hauls herself in through the container and slams the hatch shut.
And now: here in the gray darkness, lit at its edges by the Cerulean.
Skinless bang and clamor. They screech and jabber.
Rust flakes rain in her hair.
Breathe. Just breathe. And wait.
Wait for what? For them to go away? What if they don’t? Panic arcs through her. They don’t have to leave. They never have to leave. Do they even eat? Are they even human? The banging. The screeching. The volume goes up, not down. Like living inside a primate house. In here she smells that sour-burn caramel smell, sickly and sweet. The walls suddenly feel like they’re a fist crushing her.
She’s been in here less than a minute and already claustrophobia has taken root like a bad weed. Lacey tries not to vomit. Tries not to—
The entire vat shudders. Like it’s about to be knocked off its base.
They’re trying to knock it over.
Another bang. Hard, like the thing was hit by a bull. The Skinless wail now, a single keening chorus.
It almost sounds like…
An alarm.
Another slam-hit, and this time a hole opens in the side and one of the cultist’s heads crashes through—like a squirrel looking into a birdhouse. The madman’s white eyes rotate in his skull and find Lacey, and in that look Lacey spies fear.
Suddenly, the Skinless’ body wrenches upward.
The head doesn’t go with it.
A sound like someone tearing leather, and then:
The head bangs at her feet and the body is gone.
“Mary, Mother and Joseph,” Lacey whispers. Beyond the vat she hears dull thuds and bones snapping.