Apocalypse Happens (23 page)

“It does feel like a ghost town,” I murmured. “You don’t think—”

“I don’t know,” Jimmy interrupted. “Maybe.”

I didn’t point out that I hadn’t finished my sentence. Jimmy wasn’t psychic, but he wasn’t human either. However, his ability to know what I was thinking, to finish my sentences, stemmed from something that wasn’t, for a change, supernatural. It stemmed from being raised together, loving each other, sharing everything, at least until we’d stopped. That he was acting like he used to, before the world fell apart, was too precious to question and risk driving away.

“Where do you think she is?” I murmured.

“That would be your department, not mine.”

My gaze wandered over the street, the buildings. We’d passed by beautiful stately homes—some restored, others broken. In front of us lay the main street, which appeared to be more of the same—storefronts that had been renovated to resemble small-town America and others that had been left boarded and empty.

The quiet was so loud it seemed to hum, or maybe that was just the power lines overhead. I stepped forward and felt a jolt, as if I’d licked my finger and pressed it to a light socket.

Jimmy, who’d been right on my heels, started, cursed and froze. “Did you feel that?”

“Yeah,” I said. The roots of my hair still prickled. “What do you think it was?”

“Magic,” he muttered, dark eyes flicking from one side of the street to the other. “You okay? Any weird urges?”

“No urges,” I said. “I’m fine.” Or as fine as I would ever be with a dog collar around my neck and a demon murmuring in my head. “You?”

“Just dandy. Come on.”

As we walked past the hardware store, the outside light snapped on, the door opened and a tall, thin man stepped out.

His hair was so blond it was nearly white and his bugged eyes and buckteeth only contributed to the image of an overly excited palomino.

“Hey there,” he said, staring straight at me. “What’s your name?”

Jimmy stepped in front of me. “Why do you want to know?”

The man’s face creased in confusion. “Just bein’ friendly.”

“Then why don’t you want to know
my
name?”

“Jimmy.” I tugged on his arm. “It’s a small town and we’re strangers. Relax.”

He didn’t. Not completely, but he at least let me move out from behind him so I could converse with the man.

“You must be here to see the new gal,” he said.

“How’d you guess?” Jimmy asked.

“Well.” The guy hitched up his pants, which were in great danger of drooping past parts I did not want to see. He hadn’t taken his gaze off of me once. “One glance at your face, and I figured you for a relative or somethin’.”

My smile was tight, but he accepted the expression for the “yes” that it was.

“You look just like your . . .” He waited for me to supply my relationship.

I tried; I really did. But I just couldn’t get “mother” past my lips.

“Mother,” Jimmy murmured, and shrugged when I cast him a glare.

The man slapped a huge hand across a bony knee. “I knew it. Sure enough. Though your ma, if you don’t mind my sayin’, appears nearly the same age as you.”

I bet she does
, I thought sourly.

“Good genes,” Jimmy said.

“Or no genes,” I muttered.

Jimmy elbowed me in the ribs, but the man didn’t seem to notice. “Don’t have many newcomers to Cairo. Not much goin’ on here these days for em-
ploy
-ment but the one factory. Biggest thing to happen in a coon’s age was your ma showin’ up.”

He had no idea how big. Or how lucky he was that we’d arrived before she’d started stringing the streetlights with dried intestines and using severed heads to decorate the fence posts or doing whatever else she might have to do to become queen of the end of the world.

I shivered.

“Cold, miss? Chilly when the sun goes down on the river. But don’t worry; it’ll heat up tomorrow.”

“I’m sure it will,” I said.

“So”—he rocked back on his heels—“just you two come to town?”

“You see anyone else?” Jimmy asked.

“What is
with
you?” I muttered, but he ignored me.

The man didn’t take offense; I wasn’t sure why. “Just wondered if you’d need a place to stay is all.”

“Uh-huh.” Jimmy’s voice was as skeptical as his expression. “So, where’d you say she lives?” Jimmy asked.

The man pointed to the far end of town. “She’s in the biggest old house left standin’. Probably a half mile out. Just follow this street. Red brick. Pert’ near big as a hotel. Can’t miss it.”

“We won’t,” Jimmy said.

I caught a strange sound, one I recognized but couldn’t place right away because it didn’t fit. Not until the talkative, friendly townsman turned to dust right before my eyes. One minute he was solid; the next tiny particles sluiced into a pile at my feet, then drifted away on the wind.

Jimmy flipped his wrist, causing his silver switchblade—the source of the odd yet familiar noise—to fold back in two before he slipped it into his pocket.

The guy hadn’t burst into ashes, as if he’d been incinerated with a flame hotter than any known to man, as he would have if he’d been a Nephilim. No. He’d turned to dust like a—

I hadn’t a clue.

“What in hell was that?” I demanded.

“Could you be a little louder? I don’t think they heard you in Panama.”

“There’s no one here.”

“You’re wrong,” Jimmy said quietly, his gaze intent on something farther up the street.

The chill I’d felt earlier came back and gave me gooseflesh on my gooseflesh. When Sanducci moved into the road, I followed.

The sun was completely gone, the sky an icy gray. The streetlights hadn’t yet kicked in, so the figures at
the outskirts of Cairo seemed to loom up from the ground, materializing out of nowhere. Hell, maybe they had.

“There are a few other signs of the Apocalypse I left out,” Jimmy said.

“I take it those are one of them?”

“Revenants.”

“And you left them out why?”

“There are thousands of signs, which come from just as many interpretations of prophecy. I can’t remember every one. And until they actually happen”—he spread his hands—“they’re just a theory.”

The crowd of shadows began to move forward. “These look a little more solid than a theory. What are revenants?”

“ ‘When hell is full,’ ” Jimmy quoted, “ ‘the dead will walk the earth.’ ”

“Revelation?”

“George Romero.
Dawn of the Dead
.”

“They’re zombies?” I thought of the graves spilling upward as the Phoenix sprinted over them.

“Kind of.” At my evil glare he continued. “They’re a special type. Not your garden-variety zombie or they’d be decaying all over the place.”

“But they’re not Nephilim.”

“Nephilim turn to ashes, and zombies—”

“Turn to dust,” I finished.

“Uh-huh. They’re dead, not demonic.”

“How’d you know what he was?”

“Wasn’t sure. Had to stick him and see.”

“What if he’d been a person?” I snapped.

“He definitely wasn’t a person. I knew that much.”

“How?”

“Can’t you feel them?”

He jerked his chin toward the advancing shades,
which appeared to have increased greatly in number in the few seconds we’d been chatting.

That buzzing I’d sensed earlier, which I’d thought was too much silence or cancer vibes spreading from the power lines, I now recognized as the hum of supernatural entities—a lot of them.

A scuffle behind us and I spun, only to discover that there were even more revenants closing in from the rear. My knife was in my hand, and I didn’t remember how it had gotten there; I was just glad that it had.

I pressed my back to Jimmy’s. “How’d you kill the first one?”

I knew there’d been a silver knife, pointy end into the revenant, but when killing supernatural boogies, where the knife went was sometimes as important as there being a knife at all.

“Silver straight through the heart.”

“Heart only?”

“Yes.”

“Shit,” I muttered. Hitting the heart dead on isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially when you’re outnumbered a helluva lot to two.

“Do you want to surrender first?” Jimmy asked. “Or should I?”

“Huh?”

“Don’t you remember?” Jimmy turned his head, met my eyes. “Getting into that house is what we came here for.”

We had monsters to the north, monsters to the south; the adrenaline was pumping so fast all I could think of was which one I was going to stick first, then how I would roll, kick and nail the next. It took me several beats to comprehend what Jimmy had said and realize he was right.

I lowered my knife, flipped it over in my hand so I was holding the sharp side and offered it to the nearest of the walking dead.

“Take me to your leader,” I said.

CHAPTER 23

“They move pretty well for zombies,” I muttered.

The revenants had accepted our knives with little more than a shrug, then bound our hands behind us with golden chains, which made me think they’d been waiting for us. I didn’t like that thought one bit.

They looked like real, live people. No rotting parts. No zombie smell. They hadn’t said much—though they
could
talk: “Come here.” “Hands behind your back.” “Move.”

“You
sure
about them?” I asked Jimmy as we marched down the asphalt that led out of town, revenants before us, revenants behind us, but no one really close enough to hear us, especially since we’d put our heads together like thirteen-year-old girls at a slumber party and begun to whisper.

“Yeah.” He twitched one shoulder, then hissed when the golden chains slid along his wrists and smoke rose from his flesh. “I’m pretty good at sensing the undead. They might not be vampires, but they’re definitely the dead come to life.”

“So maybe they’re just zombies.” Had I
actually
used the phrase “just zombies”? “Not some apocalyptic portent.”

“Believe me, they’re an apocalyptic portent.” Jimmy took a slow, deep breath, careful not to rattle his chains,
then glanced at the revenants. But none of the walking dead appeared to care if the two of us had a nice long chat. “You’ve heard about the four horsemen?” I nodded. “They arrive when the first of seven seals is broken.”

“Seals on what?”

“In Revelation, they’re on a scroll.” He scowled at the revenants. “But that scroll represents something else. The first rider comes on a white horse. Some say it’s Jesus; most say the opposite.”

“The Antichrist.”

“Yep. And if the rider appears when a seal is broken and that rider is the Antichrist, what do you think the seal was on?”

“Hell,” I answered.

“Give the girl a gold star.”

“How did the seal get broken?”

“Hard to say, and it doesn’t really matter. What’s done is done, and we have to deal with the results.”

He was right. No sense crying over spilled demons.

“So the seal broke,” I said. “Hell opened; the demons flew free.” Now my gaze went to the revenants. “Where do they come in?”

“The first horseman is bent on conquest. Some say peaceful, but who knows?”

“And the second?”

“Red horse, guy with a sword. Makes men kill one another and removes peace from the earth.”

“Same guy?”

“I think so.”

“To conquer with peace,” I said, “you’d need a huge army.”

“Walk tall and carry a big stick.”

“Exactly. Then to spread war throughout the earth, that army would come in very handy.”

“He moves from threatening war,” Jimmy said, “to unleashing it.”

“Where do you get a huge army when you’ve been doing crosswords in Tartarus since the beginning of time?” My gaze slid to the revenants, whose footsteps sounded more like goosesteps with every block we walked.

“You raise them from the dead,” Jimmy said.

“So many bodies, so little time,” I agreed, “with the added plus of their eternal gratitude.”

That I’d seen the dead rising as the Phoenix ran over their graves, in her possession a book that contained information that would allow her to control all the demons, was looking less and less like a coincidence. In the “Who Will Be the Antichrist?” sweepstakes, I think we had a winner. Except—

“If she can control the demons, why doesn’t she?”

Jimmy didn’t answer. When I glanced at him, he was peering into the gloom. I followed his gaze.

The house rose out of a swaying field of moon-tinged grass. Huge, like the revenant had said, the red brick dull with age, the once creamy mortar jaundiced from the elements, the paint around the boarded windows peeling. The front porch listed to the right; the steps creaked threateningly as the revenants followed us inside.

There, what had once been gorgeous hardwood floors were now buckled and uneven, the walls marred by leaks and cracks. A chandelier still hung in the entryway, swaying as the breeze blew in behind us; the crystals rubbed together, the sound so light and lonely it made me nostalgic. For what, I didn’t know.

The place smelled moldy—as if it had been flooded, dried out, then flooded again times fifty—and overlying
the cool, soft scent of ancient water I caught the sharp, metallic odor of fresh blood.

“I’d like to see my mother,” I said. “The Phoenix.”

No one seemed surprised by that statement. I guess a simple glance in a mirror explained why. However, the mere mention of her name struck everyone dumb, which didn’t bode well for our meeting.

I’d harbored the hope—foolish as it might be—that the Phoenix wasn’t as bad as say . . . the woman of smoke. But I had the distinct feeling she was worse. How was I going to convince her that both Jimmy and I were ready to take a walk on the dark side?

“Upstairs.” A doughy young man—in both skin tone and body shape—with squinty eyes that screamed of too many hours in front of a computer screen, and messy, mousy hair, shoved me. If I hadn’t been super-coordinated I might have taken a nosedive into the banister.

I stumbled and righted myself, considered rearranging his face and decided I didn’t care enough. Jimmy stared at him with narrowed eyes, and the kid actually backed off. Strange considering there were so many of them and only two of us, not to mention the golden chains.