Skeleton Crew (25 page)

I glanced at him. “That's not bad,” I said. “You're usually as funny as a bunion, but you show flashes of real talent. The Dead Sea would have been pretty solid, but you bumped it up a notch when you went with Zed Sea.”

“Better Zed than Dead,” he said.

I raised an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah, you're good.”

“What's red and white and—

“No, see, you got to know when to stop. Be patient, you're learning.”

Adan grinned and then his face hardened as he looked
down at the horde surrounding the produce warehouse. “What do you think?”

The back wall of the building was a featureless expanse of red brick, but still there was a solid ring of the dead around it, at least twenty deep. The zombies in front were clawing at the brick, as if they could tunnel through the wall. The west wall had two large, barred windows. The glass was broken out and soldiers were firing through the bars. They'd thinned out the front ranks on that side, but they were less effective than I might have expected. I guessed it was hard to get a clean head-shot with a limited field of fire and a zombie horde surging around them, close enough to reach out and touch.

“They can't get to us up here,” I said. “Let's just take them out. Use fire if you've got it—it'll spread. Keep it away from the windows.”

Adan nodded and stretched out his hands toward the zombies, fingers spread.
“Bladhm,”
he said, and a fiery current jetted forth and spilled across the undead mob.

“Do you want the flamethrower spell?” I said, glancing sideways at him. Then I spun up a fireball and hurled it down at the massed zombies.

The initial damage was impressive, but the reaction wasn't what I'd been expecting. The zombies ran for cover. I'd seen enough zombies running around trying to eat people, it was hard to remember they weren't mindless monsters. Fortunately, while they had the right idea, tactically speaking, their execution was no better than any other human mob. They all tried to run in different directions and whole waves of them went down under the panicked feet of their comrades. Burning zombies unselfishly shared with their fellows that had escaped the attack, and fire spread through the desiccated bodies like rumors on a Hollywood set.

“Across the street!” a lone voice shouted. “On the roof of the white building! Get them!” Armed zombies scattered throughout the crowd opened fire and bullets chipped stucco off our building's facade, forcing us back from the edge.

“Smart zombies with guns,” I said. “No fair.” We heard breaking glass from below as zombies smashed their way into our warehouse.

Adan looked around the roof. “They're not that smart,” he said. “There's no internal stairway up here. The access ladders are the only way they're going to get at us.”

“How long will it take them to figure that out?”

“Probably not very long. If we want to stay here, we'll have to defend the ladders. There are six of them.”

“I'm not sure what good it does to stay here, anyway. The zombies shifted around to the front and sides of the building where we can't hit them.”

“We need a plan,” Adan said.

“Yeah.”

“Any ideas?”

“I was really hoping your shockwave thing would work. I don't have any spells designed to clear out several hundred zombies.”

“We could go down and fight them on the street.”

“There's too many, Adan. I don't know how good your defenses are, but they'll eventually take me down. If I don't get shot, first.”

“Maybe we need help.”

“We
are
the help, Adan.”

“Okay, let's think it through. We don't have to drop all the zombies. We just have to get Lowell and his troops out of there.”

“How are we supposed to do that? We can't even get to
the door. It would be like trying to fight our way through a mosh pit to the front of the stage. Except this mosh pit will try to eat us.”

“Yeah, and the soldiers might shoot us accidentally.”

“We need a distraction,” I said.

“That could work. What did you have in mind? Zed's not interested in much besides eating.”

“Yeah, I'll be the distraction. I'll go down there and let them get a good whiff of me, then I'll take off and they'll chase me. You get the soldiers out of there.”

“I should be the distraction,” Adan said. “I have the blast spell if the zombies get too close, and Lowell doesn't really know me.”

I didn't like it, but he had a point. I nodded. “Okay,” I said, “you're the bait. Be safe, Adan.”

He grinned and put his arm around me, pulling me to him. He leaned in and kissed me softly on the mouth.

“Every guy wants to be the hero,” he said, and then released me. I wanted to say something—anything—but my vocal cords were momentarily paralyzed. Adan drew his sword and spun his jump spell, launching from the rooftop, across the street and onto the roof of the produce warehouse.

I smelled apples and cinnamon, and tasted it on my tongue. “What the fuck just happened?” I whispered. I looked down at myself with the fairy sight, but if there was any glamour on me it was the hormonal kind. My heart was pounding in my chest and my body felt light, like my levitate spell wanted to pick me up and lift me into the air.

Adan looked back, grinned and raised his sword, then raced for the front of the building where the zombie horde waited below, howling for blood and flesh. He jumped again when he reached the edge and disappeared out of sight. The
noise intensified to an ear-grinding screech when he hit the street in the middle of the massed zombies.

I took deep, steady breaths and waited for my pulse to slow. Then I dug out my cell phone and called Lowell.

“What's going on out there, Riley? Something's got Zed all worked up.”

“That'd be Adan,” I said. He had more than zombies worked up. “He's leading them away from the building.”

“I've got a man down in here. We need to get him out fast.”

“Working on it, Lowell. Once the zombies clear out, I'll come down there and drop any stragglers. Just make sure your guys are ready to move. I don't want to leave Adan on the hook any longer than we have to.”

“I've got Black Hawks circling. Once the threat is neutralized, the helos can land in the truck lot across Santa Fe. Do you and Adan need extraction?”

“No, we can handle it. We still need to thin out the Zed population a little around here once your guys are out.”

“Okay, standing by.”

“Yeah, good, and don't shoot me when I get down there. I need my shields for the strapped zombies.”

I put the cell away and heard a scrabbling sound behind me. A zombie was climbing onto the roof from an access ladder, a black male in a red muscle shirt. He reached down and helped a girl with bright green streaks in her blond hair climb up after him. That was gentlemanly. The two of them bared their teeth and stared at me with their dead eyes. They approached slowly, warily, crouched down with their hands extended like wrestlers. Another zombie crawled up on the far side of the roof.

I didn't want to use my levitation spell because I was pretty sure I'd draw fire if I went any higher than the level
of the rooftop. “Man is born free,” I said, “but everywhere he is in chains.” Force magic whipped around the male zombie and immobilized him. I fixed the threads of magic in my mind and spun my ghost-binding spell, pulling the girl's spirit from her body. When the corpse collapsed, I dropped the chaining spell on the man and did the same to him.

Seeing the fate of the first two, the third zombie howled and charged me as four more zombies climbed onto the roof from different ladders. “Vi Victa Vis,” I said, and my force spell sent the charging zombie sprawling. I spun the ghost-binding spell just as the four newcomers charged.

“This is ridiculous,” I muttered. It was like a small-scale reenactment of the whole zombie apocalypse—crunch all you want, we'll make more. I backpedaled toward the western edge of the warehouse, pulling in juice as I went. “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,” I said, spinning a wall of repulsive force around me. The charging zombies hit the wall and were hurled away like bowling pins. One of them went screaming over the edge of the building, arms flailing.

More zombies climbed onto the roof. One of them carried a revolver and another was toting a shotgun. I reached down for more juice and my eyes started to burn. Each one of the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stood up and started dancing. My heartbeat thudded in my chest, and blood and juice pumped through me like a rain-swollen river. I threw my hands out, pushing at the plane of force and sweeping it across the rooftop like a giant invisible broom. Zombies were hurled over the side and dropped to the street and sidewalk below.

Unless I wanted to make a full-time job out of knocking zombies off the roof, I needed to move. I ran to the edge of
the building and spun my jump spell, retracing Adan's path to the roof of the produce warehouse. I ran to the front of the building and looked down. The loading area was clear, but there were only freight doors along that side. I scrambled over to the east side and finally found an access door. I dropped down in front of it and knocked.

“Riley?” Lowell called from inside.

“No, pizza guy. Open the fucking door, Lowell.” The door opened and Lowell backed away, letting me in. He touched the earpiece of his headset and started barking orders. Almost immediately, I heard the sound of helicopters in the distance.

A couple dozen soldiers in black fatigues were huddled around the office and scattered through the warehouse area. Two of them were tending to a soldier lying on a makeshift pallet of tarpaulins. It looked like his left arm had been nearly torn off, and blood soaked the canvas beneath him.

“Extraction in five minutes,” Lowell called. “Fall back to my position, on the quick.” As if to emphasize his words, an assault rifle chattered from the far side of the warehouse where a team of soldiers covered the ground-floor windows.

My cell phone rang. “Zed's moving west across the Fourth Street bridge,” Chavez said. “It's big. There might be a thousand of them.”

“We've got choppers in five minutes, Chavez. Are they already on the bridge?” It had to be a quarter mile across the river and the railroad tracks. It would be close.

“They're on the bridge and coming fast,
chola.
Maybe they saw the helicopters.”

Or the magic show. “Damn it,” I said. “Okay, I got this. Thanks for the heads-up, Chavez.” I stuck the cell back in my pocket and turned to Lowell. “We've got company,
Lowell. I'm going to hold them off—get your guys on those fucking choppers.”

Lowell frowned. “You going to be okay? I can go with you.”

“They're on the bridge, Lowell. I'll be fine.” Even with sorcery, terrain could make a difference. The zombies would be exposed on the bridge instead of wrapped around the Stag team's hidey-hole. I went out and ran across the loading area, pausing to drop a couple solitary zombies that were more or less on my way. I spun my jump spell and leaped up to the elevated street that spanned the tracks and concrete river to the east.

I walked out onto the bridge to meet the zombie horde charging toward me. I stopped in the middle of the street between two of the old-fashioned lampposts spaced at regular intervals across the length of the bridge. I started pulling juice from the street and from the outfit tags that decorated the bridge abutments. The zombies pounded across the bridge like a barbarian horde mad for blood—which was more or less what they were, despite their lack of swords and battleaxes and except for the part about being dead. When the first ranks were three hundred feet away, I spun my fire wave spell and the orange tsunami began to build behind me.

I kept flowing juice and the wave grew to twenty, then fifty, then a hundred feet high, stretching from one side of the bridge to the other. I fed more juice to the fire and it grew hotter and hotter, shattering the glass in the streetlamps and causing the metal fixtures to glow red. I wanted it hot enough to vaporize. I knew the zombies couldn't feel pain, but I wasn't sure they couldn't still experience something like terror. There would be no horribly burned bodies staggering around on the bridge when I was done
with them. There would be nothing left but grease, and ash and smoke.

When the zombie horde was a hundred feet away, I released the tidal wave and it crashed over me, thundering across the bridge and submerging the zombies in a torrent of liquid fire. The leading edges of the fire reached all the way to the overpass that crossed Mission Road. Every inch of the bridge was scoured clean. I dropped to one knee and gasped for breath as the last of the juice flushed out of me. After a few moments, the oily, black smoke began to clear. That's when I saw the demon.

Its form was an obscene parody of a woman. It was at least seven feet tall and more emaciated than any human could become and still live. Pallid flesh sagged loosely and bones protruded at hard angles like blades. Thin, greasy strands of dark hair hung down to the skeletal waist, and its breasts were tiny, withered pouches that wrinkled its sunken chest. In contrast to the rest of its consumptive frame, the demon's belly was hideously bloated, swollen to an impossible size. Black veins stood out like cracks in the fish-pale skin stretched tight over the bulging womb.

The demon's belly convulsed and contorted. It squatted with its feet braced wide apart, and dark fluids splashed onto the pavement. It grinned at me, baring broken, jagged teeth the color of charcoal. The terrible, gaping orifice between the demon's legs stretched wide, and black, clawed hands appeared, raking the stick-thin legs as something pulled itself forth into the world.

I turned away and emptied my stomach on the street. I'd seen enough to know what had wriggled out of the demon. It was a crawler. I flowed some juice to calm my shaking hands and steeled myself to look. When I did, I saw the crawler racing along the concrete barrier above the bridge
abutment. And I saw a second crawler pulling itself from the demon's womb.