Skeleton Crew (19 page)

I thrust Ned's twelve-inch barrel into her chest and it tore through shattered ribs and gristle until it reached the black pit at the center of her. I held the trigger down and thumbed the hammer, firing again and again as her skeletal body jerked and twisted in my grasp. She raised her face to the sky and screamed, and azure fire burst from her eye sockets, nose and mouth.

Ghosts answered her call. They drifted out of the trees, silent and murderous, and came for me with grasping hands and empty eyes.

“That's game,” I said. “I win.”

Honey and Jack spiraled down from the darkness, and the pixie dust they dropped on the ghosts was nearly invisible amidst the falling snow. When it touched them, the apparitions hardened and cracked like old china and crumbled to dust. Adan appeared at the gate with his rifle slung over his shoulder and his sword drawn, and he charged to engage the ghosts that made it through the piskies' blanket of destruction.

I leaned in close to La Calavera. “No one,” I said, and pushed Ned's barrel up under her jaw. “Tries.” I squeezed the trigger and the top of her skull exploded. “To eat.” I threw her to the ground and jammed the gun between her grinning teeth. “Me.” I fanned the hammer and let Ned kick and dance inside her mouth until the skull began to dissolve into black juice. I pumped a couple more rounds into the center of her torso and it, too, ran liquid, collapsing into a bubbling pool that spread slowly across the asphalt.

A high-pitched, keening wail tore through the stillness and then faded like a bad memory. With it went the feeling of oppression that had weighed on me since I crossed the threshold on La Calavera's estate. The wind died, the snow
stopped falling and the night seemed to brighten to a lighter shade of blue.

I regrouped with Adan and the piskies, and we walked up the driveway toward the house. We followed a stone-tile walkway around the side and down a set of wide stairs to the patio that spread out behind the house. The heart-shaped swimming pool was choked with detritus and stagnant water, and we skirted it to the lightly wooded lawns at the rear of the estate.

The ramshackle kennels were lit from within by the soft, golden radiance of the Xolos. As we approached, I realized we wouldn't have to open the cages to free the dogs. One by one, the lights winked out as the Xolos crossed back to the mortal world. My friends had been right. It was La Calavera that held them there, not the pens or the pit.

Still, not all of the Xolos made it back across. The piskies flew through the warren of crates and cages, checking each one and counting the dead. There were seventeen of them. With their lights snuffed out, the dead looked no different from any other dog of their breed. We couldn't think of anything else to do so we laid them out on the grass and dug graves for them. We buried them one by one. This was the spirit world and I wasn't sure how much sense it made to return them to earth that wasn't even real. But for the Xolos, perhaps it was fitting. The Xolo that had fought for me in the back room of the Mocambo club wasn't among the dead. My Xolo had survived, and he came to me and licked my hand before crossing back to the mortal world.

Our work complete, we turned and walked back across the lawn toward the house. Without warning, a deafening roar crashed over us and a jagged line like cracked glass appeared in the air before our eyes. Hateful, red light spilled through the crack and waves of heat washed over us as it
widened. Writhing tentacles curled around the edges of the crack and a dark, bulbous shape began to pull itself through from the other side.

“Demon,” Adan snarled, drawing his sword. I glanced at Adan and back at the gate. The thing that squeezed through the fracture looked more like an oversize octopus crossed with a hairy black spider than the almost human-looking giant we'd battled at the Carnival Club. Apparently, demons came in all shapes and sizes.

The massive, swollen thing oozed through the crack and plopped wetly into the grass, spider legs twitching and tentacles waving madly. Its maw looked more arachnid than cephalopod, with razor-sharp mandibles that clicked and scraped like fingernails on slate. Pearlescent slime dripped from the evil fangs, and the grass wilted and browned where it struck the lawn. The demon sat back on its bloated hindquarters and a fleshy slit opened the length of its abdomen baring row upon row of small, pointed teeth. Okay, so maybe that was its mouth and the bit with the mandibles was…some other disgusting part of its anatomy.

Honey's musical voice brought me back to my senses as she began singing battle glamours. I opened fire with Ned and scrambled to my right, maneuvering along the demon's flank. Jack dived, twisting in and out of the writhing tentacles like a jet fighter with a bogey on his six. Adan ran at the thing and then leaped in the air, flipping over the grasping tentacles and landing on its back. He slammed his sword two-handed into one of the demon's eyes, and red-orange juice like lava boiled from the wound. The monster screamed and a tentacle snaked in and lashed around Adan's neck. It lifted him into the air and he hung there for a moment, strangling, as he slashed at the tentacle with his sword. Then the demon flicked the tentacle and hurled
Adan through the night to smash into the back wall of the house.

Honey's glamour attacked the monster with cold and ice. Frost appeared on one side of its misshapen head and began to spread. Icicles formed on its mandibles and jaws where the fluids froze solid. The demon screamed and flailed with its spider legs where the cold touched its flesh.

I kept firing and looked for some weakness in the monster's defenses, some vulnerability in its hideous form. I fired again and again, and sapphire flames curled from the holes Ned tore in the demon's hide. Tentacles darted and slashed at me, and it took everything I'd learned from Adan that day to stay clear of them. I leaped and spun in a deadly dance, rolling under tentacles that sliced at my head, and vaulting gracefully over those that grasped at my legs. I kept firing as I jumped and ducked, bobbed and weaved, zigged and zagged.

Until I zigged when I should have zagged. The demon feinted at my head with a tentacle, and I rolled forward, under it, and impaled myself on the spiked talon that extended from one of its spider legs. The barb struck me just below the sternum and I felt it tear through me and out my back. I could feel the coarse hairs, like steel wool, scraping my insides as the leg twisted and twitched.

A dark curtain fell across my eyes and I sank to my knees. Another spider leg shot out and pierced my shoulder, and another lanced into my stomach. I tried to scream but I was choking on my own juice. I coughed and the azure magic sprayed across the grass, glowing faintly in the monochrome gloom. I tried to lift Ned but my arm wouldn't move. A tentacle slowly twined around my hips and another around my neck. They tightened and started to pull, and I felt my body stretch like the saltwater taffy I used to get on the
Santa Monica Pier when I was a girl. It was far more than my flesh could withstand in the mortal world. The torment was like nothing the human mind was meant to endure.

Then Adan was at my side. He slashed at the tentacles and the severed ends fell twitching into the grass. He sliced through the legs that pierced me and stood between me and the demon when I collapsed to the ground. His sword was a silver blur as the pain-maddened monster attacked, and soon the lawn was littered with bits of demon flesh and slick with the black ichor that oozed from its wounds.

As skilled as he was with the sword, Adan couldn't protect both of us at the same time. He was impaled again and again by the demon's spiked talons; tentacles hammered into him and tore at his body. But he was faster than the monster. Each time it hurt him, Adan hurt it worse. The sword spun in his hands and he pressed forward, one step at a time. He butchered the demon as he advanced, slicing through tentacles and severing legs.

For a moment, I thought the monster would run out of appendages before Adan had a chance to finish it off. That's when I noticed the severed stumps were regenerating. I struggled to a sitting position, and my vision dimmed and then steadied. “Adan,” I croaked. “It's healing.”

I don't know if he heard me, but the piskies did. Honey had maintained her glamour and one side of the demon's head was frozen in a solid sheet of ice. Jack had been working at the other side, bursting black, bulbous eyes and slicing at exposed flesh while the demon focused its attentions on Adan and me. Now the two flew to each other and huddled together. They started singing a new song in a strange and haunting harmony that sounded like a Celtic funeral dirge. They crossed swords and emerald flames licked along the blades. The fairy fire spread up their arms and across their
shoulders and chests until their whole bodies were wreathed in the ghostly flames. Jack reached over and pulled Honey to him, kissing her fiercely. Then they dove at their adversary with their burning swords held before them, streaking through the night like tiny falling stars.

When the piskies struck the demon, the explosion made the ground buckle beneath Adan and me and the shockwave knocked us both flat on our backs. A column of green fire erupted into the air and blossomed into a miniature mushroom cloud, bathing the battleground in eerie, emerald ghost-light. The fire was as warm as spring sunshine and smelled like fresh grass.

The cloud burned off and dissipated into the night, plunging the field once again into the blue-lit darkness of the Between. Nothing remained of the demon—not even bits and pieces. It had been vaporized by the blast. Jack and Honey knelt in the grass where it had been. They were kissing.

“Get a room,” I muttered as I struggled to my feet.

Adan started laughing. “The Troll King's Lament,” he said. “All the years I spent in Faerie, I never got to see it. I thought it was just a legend the piskies fed to buy a little insurance.”

Honey and Jack broke away from each other and glared at him. “If it was just a legend,” Honey said, “you and the sidhe would all be speaking Troll right now.”

I limped over to them with one hand clutching my perforated abdomen and the other gripping Ned at my side. “You might have mentioned you can nuke a motherfucker,” I said.

“The legends say it comes at great cost,” said Adan.

“It's just juice,” Jack said.

“Then why—” I started to ask, but Honey interrupted me.

“A piskie's life is just juice and we're only given so much of it,” she said. “It's just juice, Domino, but we measure the cost in
years.
”

I shut my mouth and let that sink in. Once it did, I wanted to cry. “Thank you,” I said finally. It seemed horribly inadequate. “Please don't ever do that again.”

“It is ours to give,” Jack said, “and we gave it freely.”

Slow applause echoed over the lawn from the direction of the house. I turned and saw Valafar standing on a balcony overlooking the patio and pool. He stopped clapping and rested his hands on the wrought-iron railing. “Most impressive,” he said. He spoke softly, but I heard his voice clearly despite the distance. “Of course, that—”

He was rudely interrupted by a hail of unearthly gunfire as Adan and I let loose with our magical weapons. Ethereal lead sprayed the balcony and exploded against the wall of the house behind him. Valafar ducked and quickly retreated into the shadows. We kept shooting until we were sure he was gone. I'd been spared the villainous monologue with La Calavera—I wasn't about to sit through one with Valafar.

“He's a demon,” Adan said when it was over.

“That's my guess. Motherfucker has a forked tongue—should have seen that one coming.”

“That's how Mobley is commanding the Firstborn he gates in.”

“Yeah, he's not commanding them at all. Valafar is.”

“So what does that make Valafar?”

“A hell of a lot of trouble.”

We returned to the mortal world and a city on the edge of chaos. I awoke stretched out on the sofa with several generations of Honey's family perched on my body. I rubbed my eyes, dislodging one of Honey's aunts from my forehead, and sat up. The piskies were watching the news on my plasma TV.

“The young ones are out fighting,” said the aunt. I think her name was Daisy. Or maybe Petunia. I was pretty sure it was Daisy. She looked at me accusingly, as if she couldn't understand why her daughters and nieces were battling zombies while I was lying on the couch.

I looked at the TV screen.
The apocalypse will be televised.
Live video from a news helicopter followed what was clearly a pack…no, a horde…of zombies that had just broken through the gates in Victoria Park. There had to be a hundred of them and the horde stretched all the way down West Boulevard to Pico. The black metal fence that protected the gated community from the rest of Mid-City hadn't been built with marauding zombies in mind, but it had been barricaded with cars, stacked tires, backyard swing sets and other junk pulled hastily from garages and storage sheds.

A few civilians defended the makeshift wall with shotguns, hunting rifles, handguns and lawn equipment. They started retreating down Victoria Park Drive when the horde broke through, but they didn't do it fast enough. A blood-drenched woman in a tattered hospital gown leaped at a man in a golf shirt and khaki shorts. He caved in the side of her head with an aluminum softball bat, and then she dragged him down to the street. In seconds, both vanished under the wave of zombies that crashed over them.

“Jesus Christ, we lost it,” I said as Adan came into the room with Honey and Jack.

“King Oberon says there are at least a hundred thousand zombies in the city,” said Aunt Daisy. I knew she was older than Honey, but she didn't look her age. She looked almost exactly like Honey. In fact, all the piskies in Honey's family looked alike, not to be insensitive about it.

“He was supposed to contain them,” I said, an edge of hard bitterness in my voice I hadn't intended. “This wasn't supposed to happen.” There was no audio in the coverage, but the news ticker scrolling across the bottom of the screen said BLOODY RIOTS IN LOS ANGELES. The governor had called in the National Guard and declared a state of emergency.

“My daughter says there would be more than a million already if it weren't for the Seelie Court's heroism,” Aunt Daisy said.

The ticker kept scrolling. TERROR LEVEL RAISED TO RED…WATER SUPPLY SUSPECTED.

“This can still work,” Adan said.

“How? There are maybe a hundred Xolos, Adan. They can move fast through the Between, sure, but they're not going to clean up a hundred thousand zombies anytime soon. In the meantime, the ones they don't get are going
to be making more zombies. I kept telling people, this isn't a fucking plague and we haven't found a cure. There are already too many zombies. We're done.”

“It's not just the Xolos. We also have the Seelie Court and the other outfits you called in. They've done a good job, Domino. It's been, what, five days since Terrence's nephews crawled out of their graves? Daisy is right—there could be a million zombies by now. If that had happened, we'd be a couple days away from losing the whole Southland. We still have time to contain it.”

“It's on the fucking news,” I said. “The Stag guys were supposed to keep it quiet.”

“Five days, Domino. They weren't going to be able to suppress it forever. Not with a hundred thousand zombies running around eating people. And the news thinks it's a terrorist attack. This can be contained.”

I leaned over and put my head in my hands. “I should have moved faster. Oh, fuck me, I went to a fucking
party.
”

“If you hadn't gone to that party, Oberon might be sitting this one out. And then it really
would
be game over.”

“A hundred thousand, Adan. And who knows how many before we get ahead of this thing—
if
we get ahead of it.

A hundred thousand people. How am I supposed to wrap my head around that?” I looked up and nodded at the TV screen. “They've turned Victoria Park into a fucking all you-can-eat buffet.”

“There are more than seventeen million in the South land,” Adan said. “If you hadn't taken the actions you did, they'd all be gone in a couple days. Try to wrap your head around that, instead.”

“What do we do now?” I said, staring at the images of carnage and destruction that played across the screen. “I
don't know what to do. I don't want to be responsible for this.”

Adan sat down on the couch beside me. Honey and Jack alighted on my shoulders. “We're already responsible for it, Domino,” he said. “There's no one else. With the Seelie Court, the outfits and the Xolos on the case, we can roll it back.”

I got up and walked to the French doors, threw them open and went out on the balcony. All up and down my street, families were packing up their cars and preparing to flee the city. I wondered what the streets and freeways looked like, and if any of them would make it out. Some of the houses and apartment buildings were boarded up. Were there people holed up inside or had they already left?

I suddenly understood why Chavez always had two or three cell phones within reach—I needed to talk to everybody and I didn't have much time. My first call went to Agent Lowell. I heard a series of clicks and beeps before the connection went through. I didn't know if that meant we had a secure line or if it was just the recording and monitoring equipment switching on.

“Lowell,” said Lowell.

“You need to evacuate the city. You know as well as I do this isn't a fucking plague. It's the best way to slow the spread.”

There was silence on the line for a moment. “We don't have any evacuation plans for something like this. There are plans for evacuation in the event of earthquakes, wildfires and tsunamis, but they're inadequate for this event. Successful evacuations depend on process, and the process doesn't fit.”

“I don't buy that. You get the people out of town. It doesn't seem that difficult.”

“Which areas are evacuated first? Not the coast and the areas most in danger of flooding, because that's irrelevant. So no one knows where to start. The plan doesn't apply. Where do you relocate people to? Not the safe zones designated in the plans, because they're irrelevant. So no one knows where to put the people they evacuate. The plan doesn't apply. What do you do when the rescue personnel get eaten? What do you do when you load up a bus or a helicopter and a zombie gets onboard? No one knows, because there
is
no fucking plan for that. So instead of everyone following a plan, you need top-down command and control and that's how evacuations turn into clusterfucks. On top of all that, the plans weren't developed for something on this scale. We need one hundred percent regional evacuation. We don't have anything close. We don't have the resources for it. And even if we did it would take weeks. We have days, maybe.”

“So you're not even going to try? Even if you only move out a few hundred thousand people, it makes a big difference in the math. That's a few hundred thousand who won't die, and who won't be killing a handful of other people tomorrow, and the day after that. A few hundred thousand today, a million tomorrow, pretty soon you're talking real numbers.”

“I know, Domino. But even though we know it's not a plague, the decision-makers are worried about controlling panic and disruption in other cities. A half-assed evacuation would be bad optics at a national level.”

“Fucking
optics?
What the hell does that mean, Lowell? You convince everyone it's just a Los Angeles problem, the rest of the country can still go shopping?”

“Something like that,” Lowell said. “I didn't make the decision, Domino. And the few of us who know what's
really going on, we can't
prove
this thing won't spread. We can't even fully disclose what's causing it—not outside our little community of freaks. We'd be discredited and lose what little influence we have now.”

“So the people calling the shots don't even really know what's happening?”

“That's right, Domino, they aren't aware Los Angeles is being overrun by zombies because some ghost abducted all the psychopomps so a creep called La Calavera could run a supernatural dogfighting ring in the spirit world. Maybe you'd like to come to D.C. and testify before a Congressional hearing. Just don't mention my name.”

“How much of it do the networks have?”

“Not much. Stag has put some juice into it. There have been urban legends about LSD in the water supply since the fifties, so we have plenty to work with. Speculation is more unconventional on the internet and blogosphere, of course. There are real zombies giving a play-by-play on Twitter.”

“Jesus Christ, okay, I'm hearing a hundred thousand. Does that match what you've got?”

“It's a little more…it's moving fast, Domino. That's up from maybe thirty-five thousand twenty-four hours ago. Vigilantism and riots are a big multiplier now. People aren't sure who's a zombie and who isn't.”

“Damn it, anyone who walks with a limp is probably getting gunned down. We haven't been able to contain it at all?”

“Your people are doing a good job, but it's getting away from them.”

“King Oberon can bring in a lot more…he's got a nation on the other side. But he needs territory to support them. If I keep giving him L.A. real estate, all the outfits will end up working for the fairies.”

“I'll run it up the chain of command, Domino, but I don't think I can sell parceling out the sovereign territory of the United States to some fairy king. If it came to that, I think the decision-makers would rather give up L.A. They do still have the unconventional protocols.”

“Fire-bombing the city.”

“Yeah, but as unthinkable as that is for us, Domino, it's a scenario with a manageable end-state. L.A. is destroyed, it's the worst tragedy in our history, it's crippling to the country…but it's
over.
Oberon is a whole new open-ended crisis that no one knows how to manage. They're not going down that road when there's a clean way out.”

“You're talking about murdering millions of people and calling it a clean way out.”

“They wouldn't have to murder anyone,” Lowell said. “In a few days, there won't be anyone left alive in Greater Los Angeles. They won't call in the Air Force until then. Maybe they'll even lock down the city and put boots on the ground. A couple hundred thousand combat troops should be able to clear it out in a year or two. Most likely, it'll be a combined forces scenario and it'll be over sooner than that.”

“We can't let this happen, Lowell.”

“I know,” he said quietly. “Tell me what you need.”

“This is a race. Between the Xolos, the outfits and the sidhe, we can drop zombies faster than they can kill people. Problem is, even if I throw open the door for Oberon, we're outnumbered.”

“We need to minimize the zombies' reproductive efficiency,” Lowell said.

“Right. If I can get even a thousand Xolos, gangsters and sidhe together, each dropping maybe ten zombies an hour, we can get ahead of it. But we have to control how quickly
civilians are getting killed. The single best way to do that is to get them out of town. Just getting them away from the dense areas will help. Spread them out. Fewer live bodies means fewer zombies get made, and more slowly.”

“I'll try.”

“You're a fucking sorcerer, Lowell. Juice every motherfucker in the chain of command if you have to, just make it happen.”

“Okay.”

“Other than magic, is there any good way to put down a zombie?”

“Head shots work, the more extensive the brain trauma the better. Decapitation is best—some animation remains in the corpse, but the zombie is effectively neutralized.”

“So it might lie there and twitch a little, but you won't get eaten unless you trip and fall on a head.”

“Yeah.”

“Then I want troops, Lowell. Send in some army guys with M-16s and machetes.”

“I can bring in a black ops task force,” Lowell said. “A couple hundred combat personnel. Support elements and maybe a few Black Hawks. Anything more and we can't keep this dark, and Domino, we really don't want that.”

“Whatever you can get.”

“I'm just not sure how effectively I can deploy my guys. I don't want to send my teams on house-to-house search-and-destroy missions. It's slow, it's dangerous and there are going to be civilian casualties, which doesn't exactly help our cause.”

“I can find targets for you.”

“How?”

“Banshees. They'll identify targets and coordinate our efforts.”

“They can do that?”

“I hope so.”

 

The next call went to Chavez. “Tell me you rescued the dogs,
chola,
” he said when he picked up the phone.

“Yeah, but there are only a hundred of them, Chavez. They'll never catch up on the backlog. We have to help them out.”

“We're doing our best. All the bosses got their outfits on zombie patrol, except Terrence and Mobley.”

“I know, and we have to keep dropping zombies. But we've got to protect civilians, Chavez. The best way to slow down the zombies is to keep the living away from them.”

“How you want us to do that,
chola?
If we're herding civilians, that's going to slow us down on the zombie killing.”

“I want sanctuaries. You put civilians in every juice box we've got—every crack house, shooting gallery, tattoo parlor and strip club. You tune up the wards on them and put enough shepherds in there to keep the wolves at bay. The rest keep sweeping the streets, dropping bodies. You put them on rotation so everyone gets a rest. Everyone except the big hitters—they all stay on the street. The banshees are going to feed you target locations.”