Empire's End (10 page)

She turned, shaking, to look at Finnegan. His
back was towards her, and he was digging candy from his pocket
while he snarled at the other man. Lily started to back away.

Finnegan glanced over his shoulder. “Hey, you
stay put.”

He saw the terror in her eyes.

He knew that she knew.

“Come here,” he barked, turning toward her.
She broke into a run. “Goddammit!” he yelled, and barreled after
her.

She ran into an alley filled with carts, some
kind of market, and she bolted behind the carts but kept moving
because he would find her if she stopped. She could never stop
running, not as long as she heard his puffing and cursing in the
distance. She had to keep running.

Boyish good looks could only get you so far.
Tripper had gotten his hands dirty a few times, but he strove to
live by the code he’d learned up north: honor the living and fuck
the dead.

He pulled his tattered jacket around his thin
frame and reclined in a broken couch, seated in a garishly-lit
alley in deep downtown. Not even Meyer’s boys bothered coming
around here. What was there to be gained? This district was a hovel
for bums. Strange people. Tripper had known a guy with a CD player
once. He had
The Best of the Doors
and that was all he had,
played it incessantly. Humming to himself, Tripper fished a lighter
from his pocket and patted himself down for a joint.

“People are strange, when you’re a
stranger...”

Tripper was undocumented. He’d snuck across
the Canadian border during Wall construction. As far as Gaylen was
concerned, he didn’t exist. And he wasn’t the only one.

Strange people. Lots of ‘em.

It was a lot better to live off the grid,
outside the system. Especially one as fucked as this. He wouldn’t
be tied down when the ship started to sink.
Honor the
living
... well, the people around here acted like they were
already dead. He supposed they might as well be.

“Over here sweetie.”

Campbell led a small girl into the alleyway,
closing a chain-link gate behind her. Tripper sat up and asked,
“What’s the haps?”

“I found her a few blocks over,” Campbell
said gravely. “I think she’s running from Meyer.”

“Shit.” Tripper beckoned to the girl. “It’s
okay. We’re nice people. What’s your name?”

She wouldn’t speak. Tripper looked to
Campbell, who nodded and knelt beside the child.

“My name’s Cam. Will you tell me your
name?”

“Lily.” The girl looked up slightly, almost
meeting Cam’s eyes. “I like your voice.”

“I’m from Australia,” Cam said with a smile.
“Do you know where that is?”

Lily shook her head. Tripper got up off the
couch and sat on a box beside his girlfriend. “Where are you from,
kiddo?”

“Louisiana.”

“That’s a long ways away. Not as far as
Australia, but still pretty far.”

“Where did you come from just now?” Cam
asked. Lily’s eyes fell again.

“It’s okay,” Cam assured her. “We aren’t
going to take you back.”

“I want to go home,” Lily said, lip
trembling. “But I don’t have one.”

“Neither do we,” said Tripper. “But do you
know what that means? It means bad people can’t find us.”

Cam put her hand on Lily’s back. The girl
flinched a little, but quickly relaxed. “Where’s Australia?” she
asked.

“It’s a really big island on the other side
of the world,” Cam told her. “They’ve gotten rid of almost all the
rotters over there. It’s a nice place.”

“Then why did you come here?”

Cam winked. “To kick zombie ass.”

It wasn’t far from the truth. She was a free
spirit, to say the least. Working as a dancer in Adelaide, she’d
seen the undead presence all but stamped out while reports were
pouring in from around the world, all saying one thing: they were
dying out there.

What could a twenty-four-year-old stripper
do? As much as anyone else, she figured. Other countries were
sending radio transmissions bouncing across the atmosphere begging
for some kind of support—for anything. Were they simply going to
ignore the cries? Was she somehow entitled to live in a world
without the plague while everyone else suffered?

Her friends didn’t understand. They weren’t
much for soul-searching. But they hadn’t lived her life either. She
was a lot tougher than she looked.

The question was not just where to go, but
how o get off Australia. It wasn’t as if planes and boats were
leaving on a daily basis. No, the only people who were crazy enough
to go out into no man’s land were the scientists.

She’d bought her way onto a ship bound for
French Polynesia’s plague labs. From there, she caught another ship
to the wasteland that was Mexico. And by the time she’d hacked her
way to the southern U.S. border, there weren’t soldiers guarding it
anymore.

She’d never felt more alive than she did
among the undead. To live and die in Adelaide without so much as a
whimper, that just wasn’t her style.

Settling here with Tripper hadn’t originally
been part of the plan, but he had awakened her to humanity’s fatal
flaws and the way they were manifest in these Great Cities. And,
after he introduced her to a man named Thackeray in the badlands,
she understood that, in order to defeat the plague once and for
all, they first had to bring this system down.

Thackeray had told her about Cleveland, about
how it was no longer part of the safe zone, even though the Senate
claimed it was. Undesirables—criminals who wouldn’t bow to men like
Meyer, or those who challenged the politics of the Great Cities, or
those with communicable diseases—they were “relocated” to
Cleveland, outside the Wall, and left for dead. And if Cam and
Tripper were ever caught, the same would happen to them.

The same would likely happen to this little
girl if she were ever recovered.

“We’ll take care of you,” Cam told Lily.
Tripper nodded solemnly. Lily tried to smile, but something in her
had broken and she couldn’t do it.

Adam lay beneath a pile of refuse, silently
observing the inhabitants of the latest town. They were typical
rotters, standing in the road and in storefronts and under trees,
staring at nothing, asleep for all intents and purposes until
something came along to stir their senses.

This was the first time he had experienced
the drop in temperature as winter approached. A thin layer of snow
lay atop him and in the alley where he rested. It was prickly and
bitter cold, permeating his flesh.

The dead began to move.

They were looking down the street, toward a
point he couldn’t quite see, and they were starting to shuffle in
that direction. Adam slowly pulled himself from the garbage and
crawled toward the mouth of the alley.

There was a dead man in the road holding
torches: two in one hand, one in the other. Attracted by the
flames, unafraid, the other undead crowded around him.

He started throwing the torches into the
air.

Juggling.

He began to walk backwards. He was leading
them out of the town!

Adam leapt to his feet ad strapped the scythe
on. He didn’t understand what this was, but it had to be
stopped—

The hammer caught him in the base of the
spine and sent him hurtling into the street.

Dizzy with pain, Adam started to push himself
up. The Strongman’s massive weapon swung into his side and he was
in flight again, sailing away from the Fire Juggler and smashing
into the shell of a pickup truck.

The Strongman ran at him like a behemoth
straight out of Hell. Adam threw the truck door open and deflected
the hammer long enough to get on his feet. He broke for the other
side of the street.

What was happening?

“
He talked his performers into turning
with him. They were willingly infected—most of them
anyway.”

The Strongman, a tableau of inked horrors
across his muscular torso, bore down on Adam with the hammer held
high over his head. Adam feinted left, bolted right. The Strongman
moved with him, graceful for his monstrous size; and Adam was
knocked through a window into a general store.

He crashed through a counter and slammed into
the wall. Pain erupted in every joint of his body. He saw red. He’d
never experienced anything like this before—and he was afraid.

He felt something clamp down on his leg, and
he was dragged back through the wreckage of the counter and swung
into a metal shelf. Jags of pain like long, thin needles ripped
into him. He was picked up and smashed down again. It was almost as
if he were going to sleep now, the world darkening and slowing down
around him. Was this unconsciousness? If he were knocked out, what
would happen to him then?

He knew what would happen. He would be
destroyed.

Adam lashed out with the scythe. He struck
something hard. The hammer.

The Strongman stumbled back as Adam swung
viciously, the blade streaking through clouds of dust scant inches
from the rotter’s flesh. The Strongman looked around for an
exit.

Adam ran at him—

And a cluster of rubbery limbs ensnared him,
dragging him back into the shelves. He felt at least three arms
tightening around his throat. He tried to swing the scythe
backwards—the blade struck a wall and was pulled off his arm.

NO!

A smothering weight forced him into the wall.
Struggling to free himself, Adam got his first glimpse at his
assailant—a four-armed man with gaping, fish-like jaws.

The Geek’s arms were malformed,
underdeveloped, but still strong enough to hold onto his prey. The
elasticity of his flesh meant there was no slipping free. He had
Adam wrapped up in his limbs and was gnawing at his face.

Adam forced his hand up through the tangle of
arms and drove his fingers into the Geek’s eyes. The rotter snapped
at him, thrashing his head about, but Adam pushed harder and sunk
his fingertips into the sockets of the undead’s skull. Now he was
the one with a handhold.

The Strongman could be heard heaving shelves
aside. He was coming.

The Geek released Adam and pawed at his eyes
with all four hands. Adam kicked the rotter into the Strongman’s
path and ran for the back of the store. He hit a door, plowed right
through it, and was outside again. The cold slapped his shredded
face.

The scythe was still inside! He didn’t stand
a chance without it. Before he could think of what to do, he heard
footfalls, dozens of them—runners. They were coming around the
building.

It was true. The King of the Dead and his
traveling circus were real. As Adam fled down the back street, the
image of the Fire Juggler flashed through his mind. Drawing the
dead in with those spinning torches...

The circus was recruiting.

Something barreled into his legs and he went
sprawling. It was a dwarf, with a pinched rotten face and spurs of
bone, like horns, growing from its skull.

Adam scrambled down an alley and back toward
the main thoroughfare. If he could just make it to that store!

A literal human pincushion staggered across
the street toward him, skewers of all lengths stuck through its
body. The metal rattled loudly as the thing came at him. From the
sidewalk approached a stiff-legged, cadaverous giant, not as wide
as the Strongman but taller. Yawning wounds in his flesh had been
filled entirely with bone tissue, and outgrowths of bone threaded
through the rotter’s limbs and ribs, weaving in and out of gray
flesh. The aberrant skeletal growth made the Petrified Man look as
if he were armored.

Transfixed with horror, Adam almost didn’t
see the Geek pushing through the dead in the street. The locals
were mesmerized by the Juggler; only these sideshow curiosities
were pursuing him. They behaved more like animals than rotters.
They must have developed a pack mentality, complete with
hierarchy... which meant the King himself was nearby.

And he was.

As Adam ran away from the rotters, further
into town and away from his scythe—he saw Eviscerato standing alone
in the road, cane twirling in his bony hands.

Leaping into Adam’s path, he sent the cane
crashing into his knee. Adam tried to stay upright and keep running
but the rotter jumped onto his back, and then Adam was on his knees
and the cane was choking him. There was no risk of suffocation for
Adam—but there was the risk of his head being torn off.

Eviscerato bit into Adam’s scalp. Adam
grabbed the cane and tried to force it away, but Eviscerato was too
strong! The world began to go dark again.

He went limp. The very last thing he saw
before losing consciousness was the Fire Juggler’s approach, and
the last thing he felt was searing heat.

Casey brought everyone into the squad room
early the next morning. There were a few P.Os Voorhees had never
seen before; but then he was barely acquainted with his own
partner.

“Senator Manning is going to be giving a
public address at the amphitheater in about two hours,” Casey told
them. “Something about plans for a new hospital. We’ll be doing
security. This shouldn’t pull you away from your regular beat for
too long.”

Emily Halstead rolled her eyes at Voorhees.
Casey caught it. “This might not seem like much of a priority to
some of you, but it’s the job. Orders are from Gillies himself.
Your streets can wait.”

Under Finn Meyer’s watchful eye,
Voorhees thought.

He hadn’t told anyone about his lakefront
exchange with Meyer and Pat Morgan. Probably wouldn’t have done him
a damn bit of good.

He glanced Halstead’s way. Maybe he’d tell
her about it. She seemed to have her head on straight.

He and Blake were assigned to stand out on
the stage where Manning would speak. They’d be surrounded on three
sides by Gaylen’s citizens. Their primary responsibility would be
to keep people back from the stage. Voorhees hefted his baton in
his hand and sighed. It’d be worthless against a shooter, but of
course
no one
in Gaylen owned a firearm.