Beautiful Chaos (58 page)

I didn’t want to mention that if she squeezed me any tighter, I wouldn’t be. I could already feel what little energy I had left draining out of me. “I think so.”

“Hey, you two are heavier than you look. And it was my first time. Cut me some slack.” Link was still grinning. “I did save your lives.”

I held out my fist. “You did, man. We’d be dead if it wasn’t for you.”

He tapped his knuckles against mine. “I guess that makes me a hero.”

“Great. Now your head’s gonna be even bigger, if that’s possible.” He knew what I was really saying—
thanks for saving my ass and the girl I love.

Lena hugged him. “Well, you’re my hero.”

“I did sacrifice the Beater.” Link looked over at me. “How bad was it?”

“Bad.”

He shrugged. “Nothin’ a little duct tape can’t fix.”

“Hope you’ve got a lot of it. How did you find us, anyway?”

“You know how they say animals can sense tornados and earthquakes and stuff like that? Guess it’s the same for Incubuses.”

“The earthquake,” Lena whispered. “Do you think it made it to town?”

“It’s already hit,” Link said. “Main Street split open right down the middle.”

“Is everyone okay?” I meant Amma, my dad, and my hundred-year-old aunts.

“I dunno. My mom took a mess a people down to the church, and they’re holed up in there. She said somethin’ about the foundation and the steel in the beams and some show she saw on the nature channel.” Leave it to Mrs. Lincoln to rescue everyone on her street with educational programming and a talent for ordering people around. “When I left, she was screamin’ about the apocalypse and the seven signs.”

“We have to get to my house.” We didn’t live as close to church as Link did, and I was pretty sure Wate’s Landing wasn’t built to withstand earthquakes.

“There’s no way. The road split right behind me as soon as I turned off a Route 9. We’re gonna have to go through Perpetual Peace.” It was hard to believe Link was volunteering to go into the cemetery at night, in the middle of a supernatural earthquake.

Lena put her head on my shoulder. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

“Yeah? Well, I’ve had a bad feelin’ since I got back from Neverland and turned into a Demon.”

When we walked through the gates of His Garden of Perpetual Peace, it was anything but peaceful. Even with the glowing
crosses, it was so dark I could barely see. The lubbers were going nuts, buzzing so loud that it sounded like we were in the center of a wasps’ nest. Lightning cut through the darkness, cracking the sky the way the earthquake had cracked the earth.

Link was leading the way, since he was the only one who could see much of anything. “You know, my mom’s right about one thing. In the Bible, it says there’ll be earthquakes at the end.”

I looked at him like he was nuts. “When was the last time you read the Bible? In Sunday school, when we were nine?”

He shrugged. “Just sayin’.”

Lena bit her bottom lip. “Link could be right. What if Abraham didn’t cause this, and it’s a result of the Order being broken? Like the heat and the bugs and the lake drying up?”

I knew she felt responsible, but this wasn’t caused by a Mortal End of Days. This was a supernatural apocalypse. “And Abraham just happened to be reading about cracking open the earth to let all the Demons out?”

Link looked over at me. “What do you mean, lettin’ the Demons out? Lettin’ them outta where?”

The ground started to tremble again. Link stopped, listening. It seemed like he was trying to determine where the quake was coming from, or where it would hit next. The rumbling changed to a creaking sound, as if we were standing on a porch that was about to collapse. It sounded like a thunderstorm underground.

“Is another one going to hit?” I couldn’t decide if it was better to run or stand still.

Link looked around. “I think we should—”

The ground underneath us seized, and I heard the asphalt splitting. There was nowhere to go, and not enough time to get there, anyway. The asphalt was crumbling around me, but I
wasn’t falling down. Pieces of the road were jutting up toward the sky.

They scraped against each other, forming a crooked concrete triangle, until they stopped. The glowing crosses started flickering out.

“Tell me that isn’t what I think it is.” Link was backing away from the dead grass, dotted with plastic flowers and headstones. It looked like the headstones were shifting. Maybe another aftershock was coming, or worse.

“What are you talking about?” The first gravestone came out of the dirt before he had time to answer. It was another earthquake—at least, that’s what I thought.

But I was wrong.

The gravestones weren’t falling over.

They were being pushed up from underneath.

Stones and dirt were flying into the air and coming back down like bombs being dropped from the sky. Rotted caskets forced their way out of the ground. Hundred-year-old pine boxes and black lacquered coffins were rolling down the hill, breaking open and leaving decaying corpses in their wake. The smell was so disgusting, Link was gagging.

“Ethan!” Lena screamed.

I grabbed her hand. “Run!”

Link didn’t need to be told twice. Bones and boards were flying through the air like shrapnel, but Link was taking the hits for us like a linebacker.

“Lena, what’s happening?” I didn’t let go of her hand.

“I think Abraham opened some kind of door into the Underground.” She stumbled, and I pulled her back to her feet.

We reached the hill that led to the oldest part of the cemetery,
the one I had pushed Aunt Mercy’s wheelchair up more times than I could count. The hill was dark, and I tried to avoid the huge holes I could barely see.

“This way!” Link was already at the top. He stopped, and I thought he was waiting for us. But when we made it up the hill, I realized he was staring out into the graveyard.

The mausoleums and tombs had exploded, littering the ground with hunks of carved stone, bones, and body parts. There was a plastic fawn lying in the dust. It looked like someone had dug up every grave on the hill.

There was a corpse standing at the far end of what used to be the good side of the hill. You could tell it had been buried for a while by the state of decay. The corpse was staring at us, but it had no eyes. The sockets were completely empty. Something was inside it, animating what was left of the body—the way the Lilum had been inside Mrs. English.

Link put up his arm to keep us behind him.

The corpse cocked its head to one side, as if it was listening. Then a dark mist poured out of its eyes, nose, and mouth. The body went slack and dropped to the ground. The mist spiraled like a Vex, then shot across the sky and out of the graveyard.

“Was that a Sheer?” I asked.

Link answered before Lena. “No. It was some kinda Demon.”

“How do you know?” Lena whispered, as if she was afraid she might wake more of the dead.

Link looked away. “The same way a dog knows when it sees another dog.”

“It didn’t look like a dog to me.” I was trying to make him feel better, but we were way past that.

Link stared at the body lying on the ground where the Demon
stood only moments ago. “Maybe my mom’s right and this is the End a Days. Maybe she’s gonna get a chance to use her wheat grinder and her gas masks and that inflatable raft after all.”

“A raft? Is that what’s strapped to the roof of your garage?”

Link nodded. “Yeah. For when the waters rise and the Lowcountry floods and God takes his vengeance on all us sinners.”

I shook my head. “Not God. Abraham Ravenwood.”

The ground had finally stopped shaking, but we didn’t notice.

The three of us were shaking so hard, it was impossible to tell.

12.17

S
ixteen bodies were lying in the county mortuary. According to the Shadowing Song from my mom, there should have been eighteen. I didn’t know why the earthquakes had stopped and Abraham’s army of Vexes had disappeared. Maybe destroying the town had lost its appeal once we were gone and the town was, well, destroyed. But if I knew anything about Abraham, there was a reason. All I knew was that this kind of broken math, the place where the rational met the supernatural, was what my life was like now.

And I knew without a doubt that two more bodies would join the sixteen. That’s how much I believed in the songs. Number seventeen and number eighteen. Those were the numbers I had in the back of my mind as I drove out to County Care. The power was out there, too.

And I had a terrible feeling I knew who number seventeen would be.

The backup generator was flickering on and off. I could tell by the way the safety lights were flashing. Bobby Murphy wasn’t at the front desk; in fact, nobody was. Today’s catastrophic events at His Garden of Perpetual Peace weren’t going to raise too many eyebrows at County Care, a place most people didn’t know about until tragedy struck. Sixteen. I wondered if there were even sixteen autopsy tables at the mortuary. I was pretty sure there weren’t.

But a trip to the mortuary was probably a regular event around here. There was more than one revolving door between the dead and the living as you made your way down these hallways. When you walked through the doors of County Care, your universe shrunk, smaller and smaller, until your whole world was your hallway, your nurse, and your eight-by-ten antiseptic peach of a room.