Skeleton Crew (23 page)

I dropped another dozen zombies between Washington and the Santa Monica Freeway ramp. Most of them were stragglers, and I had time to use the ghost-binding spell before they could get close. A few jumped out from behind cars and attacked, and I had to use force magic to create some space. A couple of them were armed. One middle-aged woman in sweatpants and a long, bloodstained Dodgers T-shirt came at us with a butcher knife in one hand and a hammer in the other. She leaped down from the roof of a blue minivan, and I barely had time to trigger my repulsion talisman before she landed right on top of me. The force magic knocked her across the street, and she was impaled on the climbing hooks of a utility pole. The woman wriggled on the hooks like a fish on the end of a line until I stepped up and tore her spirit from her body. I used my telekinesis spell to pull her body down.

Ethan and Dylan stayed at my side through all of this, their eyes glued to their sneakers.

I heard the zombie horde before I saw them. At first I thought it was another riot in progress down by the freeway. It sounded like a riot, like a mob—a cacophony of shouts and screams that blended together to create a dull roar that raised the hair on the back of my neck. Then I saw them pouring down the off-ramp from the freeway into the street. It reminded me of the footage I'd seen from Victoria Park. A lot of the zombies fell as they scrambled and staggered down the ramp, and the others just kept coming, climbing over the fallen and grinding them underfoot. I
could see more zombies marauding among the cars up on the freeway. Some of the living had crawled over the barrier and hung from the overpass. Others jumped or fell to the street below.

I looked around for a defensible spot but didn't see any attractive candidates. With no other options, I picked up Ethan and Dylan and carried them to a tractor-trailer rig that had been abandoned in the gridlocked traffic. With one of the boys under each arm, I spun my jump spell just as the first zombies reached us. Ethan was tucked under my right arm and I didn't have a good grip on him because I was still holding the forty-five. I lost him when we landed on the roof of the trailer and he slid and tumbled toward the edge.

“All movements go too far!” I shouted as he fell over the side. The telekinesis spell caught him and pulled him back just before he reached the eager, outstretched arms of the zombies below.

There was plenty of food for the zombies stuck in the traffic jam, both down on the street and up on the freeway, but we attracted enough attention that our truck was quickly surrounded. The more enterprising zombies began rocking the trailer. Others threw rocks or junk they picked up off the street at us, hoping to knock us off our perch. I had Ethan and Dylan lie down flat on the roof of the trailer, and I spun my defensive shields to protect us. Zombies began climbing onto the cab of the truck to get at us and I knocked them down with force magic. I didn't have time to use my witch sight, and I couldn't be sure all of them were zombies. I told myself there was no way a living human could survive long enough to climb up on the truck.

These zombies might have been brighter than the average movie zombies but they were every bit as relentless. I
thought after a while they might notice they weren't getting anywhere with me and decide to look for easier prey. But once the idea we'd be their next meal got into their heads, it stayed there. The sea of zombies around the truck kept getting bigger and bigger as more of them noticed us. They were a carpet of decomposing flesh completely covering the street and empty cars and they stretched as far as I could see.

There was no break in the shouting, screaming and wailing of the hungry dead. It grew louder and louder as more of them swarmed around the truck. It was impossible to think. Could I fight my way through so many zombies with the children in tow? I couldn't even be sure how many of them there were. I could start throwing fireballs and other destructive spells, but could I keep it up long enough to reach safety? I could call Chavez for reinforcements but I'd be putting anyone he sent in terrible danger. I might have been willing to do it anyway, but even if they could reach me it would pull them away from defense of the sanctuaries.

If it had just been me, I was pretty sure I could have walked to Pasadena without a zombie getting its rotten hands on me. I could make it, but I wasn't sure Ethan and Dylan would. I needed help.

“Adan,” I called, reaching out with the juice.

“Domino, where are you?” he said, the words echoing in my mind. “Are you in trouble?”

“You could say that. I'm on Alameda down by the 10.

I've got a couple civilians with me—little ones—and we're surrounded. I could use a hand, but I don't see how anyone can get to me.”

“Open a gate,” Adan said.

“What?”

“Open a gate to the Between and call me, just like you did with Honey.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh, yeah.”

I did as he instructed. A shimmering hole opened in the thick, heavy air and Adan stepped through onto the roof of the truck. He was still wearing the black fatigues and his sword was in his hand. He looked down at the writhing mass of zombies surrounding the truck.

“I told you the brain-scented perfume was a bad idea,” he said.

I laughed. “Do brains even have a scent?”

Adan's grin turned into a hard line. “To them, maybe. Who are your friends?”

“Ethan and Dylan. They've been with me all the way from Huntington Park.”

“Tough kids. Okay, let's get out of here.”

“What's the plan?”

“This,” he said. He spread his arms out to his sides, one hand palm-out toward the zombies and his sword held aloft in the other.
“Ar shiúl,”
he shouted, and a ground-level shockwave exploded from our position and expanded like a ripple on the surface of a pond. The zombies swarming the truck were either flattened where they stood or hurled through the air at such speed it was like a gray blur rolling away from us.

I looked around at the destruction. “Holy shit. Is that the sidhe language?”

“Gaelic,” Adan said. “I failed to master the sidhe power words.”

“The Gaelic ones seem pretty good.”

Adan grinned and nodded. “Let's go.” He reached down and scooped up Ethan in one arm.
“Léimim,”
he said, and he leaped to the cab and then down to the street. His power
words had a real advantage in terms of speed and convenience. My quotations still had more personality, though. I grabbed Dylan and took a running jump from the trailer, then spun my levitation spell and landed easily beside Adan on a small patch of asphalt that wasn't occupied by fallen zombies.

Adan's spell had broken the zombies, but it hadn't destroyed them. As we picked our way through the bodies, they reached for us, grasping at our ankles and clothes. Others crawled or dragged themselves toward us. We cut our way through them with combat and spirit magic and finally reached the freeway overpass. A man was standing on the roof of a car on the far side. He wore a long, leather pimp coat with no shirt underneath and baggy trousers. Heavy gold chains hung from his neck and decorated his bare chest. A Nike flat cap was tugged low on his head and large, gold-rimmed sunglasses hid his eyes. One side of his face was burned black and hairless, and his ear was a fused lump of charred flesh.

It was Simeon Wale.

He held his arms out to his sides and a line of zombies pushed forward, moving between and over the immobilized and abandoned vehicles. He brought his arms down and the zombies stopped, crouching on car hoods or standing stiffly, their limbs trembling with anticipation.

I looked at Wale with my witch sight. “He's a fucking zombie,” I whispered to Adan. “And he's still juiced up. How is that possible?”

Adan shook his head. “He's still got his mind and soul. That's all he needs.”

“I knew you be coming to the Men's Room,” Wale said, his voice echoing hollowly under the freeway. “Found you with my seeing words, but couldn't get here till just now.”

“What do you want, Wale?”

“Thought I might eat you, if that's okay.”

“Lot of people have tried that, lately,” I said. “No one's gotten more than a bite of me yet. I'm sorry you died, Wale, but what's your fucking problem? We can still use you—you can join Anton's crew.”

“See, that's just it, I got some workplace resentment. I guess you can see I got my own crew. Don't want to join Heavy Chevy's fucking crew. Don't want you telling me what to do and when. I should have been lieutenant when you got a bump. Only reason I ain't is you scared of me.”

He grinned, showing me a grill full of gold, diamond-encrusted teeth. “I guess you probably right to be scared of me, though.”

“I don't have time to kill you right now, Wale. Maybe this can wait until my schedule clears up a little.”

“I guess you got to make time 'cause I'm a hungry mother fucker.”

“You honestly think you can take both Adan and me?”

“Not especially, to tell the truth. That's why I was real glad to see you got those shorties with you. It was just you and fairy-boy, I probably be in some trouble. But I figure he gonna have to protect them kids, leave you and me to do our thing.”

I glanced at Adan. He raised his eyebrows and gave a little shake of his head. If Wale still had his magic, the only way we could protect Ethan and Dylan was to get them off the battlefield, quickly. I nodded and mouthed the word
Go.

I heard Adan's voice inside my head. “It's only a few blocks to the club. Stall for time, and I'll be back.” Then he sheathed his sword and took Dylan from me.
“Léimim!”
he shouted, and I felt the juice welling up from the street into
him. The jump spell carried Adan and the children to the freeway overhead.

I turned and looked back at Wale. He raised his arms again and then brought them down sharply. A terrible cry rolled along the line of zombies and they surged forward. I spun my levitation spell and rose into the air, and the walking dead reached for me, howling in frustration.

Most of them did, anyway. A few of the zombies were Wale's gangsters and they opened fire. I spun my defensive shield and the hail of bullets filled the air around me with electric-blue starbursts. This was, at best, a temporary counter to the strapped zombies. For one thing, they could probably keep reloading longer than I could keep the shield up. For another, the juice I was putting into the shield was juice I wasn't using to put the hurt on Wale.

I was on Rashan's turf, now, and I could reach plenty of juice. I pulled magic out of the tags that scrolled across the blue corrugated fence to my right and the freeway overpass above. “What medicines do not heal, the lance will,” I said. “What the lance does not heal, fire will.” A line of red-orange flame flared to life across the street from curb to curb. I poured juice into it and it grew as if I fed it with gasoline, rising behind me like a curtain that spanned the street. Windows shattered from the heat and the first fuel tank ignited. The resulting fireball was impressive, but I was somewhat disappointed the car wasn't hurled into the air by the explosion. Hollywood did it better.

The writhing curtain of liquid fire grew to a height of at least fifty feet, and then I released it. Like a tidal wave rolling straight out of hell, it raced forward, flowing harmlessly around my body, and crashed down on the zombies in Wale's crew. The fire tumbled and splashed like lava coursing through the street and it consumed all it touched, flesh
and steel alike. I could hear the zombies' screams despite the staccato fuel-tank explosions, and I reminded myself that while they were frightened they were beyond the reach of mortal pain.

The dying edges of the fire wave reached far enough to engulf the car Wale was standing on, but he leaped into the air above the flames and hung there. He started hitting me with spontaneous attack spells and all other thoughts fled as I focused on defense. I'd always known Wale had juice. Other than Rashan, he might have been the strongest sorcerer in the outfit. He was fooling himself if he really thought I'd ever been afraid of him, but I'd never trusted him, either. The evil inside him was as easy to see as the magic.

The fact was, I wasn't sure I could take him. Despite what I knew it would do to me, I would have considered using glamour on him, except I could see he was protected.

I could use my fairy magic to defeat those wards, but I was pretty sure the juice would incapacitate me before I could pull them down. There wouldn't be any shortcuts or clever angles in this fight. If I wanted to beat Wale, I had to do it straight up. I began alternating between defensive magic and killing magic, spinning the spontaneous spells as quickly as my mind could give birth to them.

As we pulled more and more juice out of the street, the magic began to encroach more forcibly on the physical world. The arcane energies we were harnessing clashed in the space between us, creating a nimbus of shifting colors that danced and played along the edges of human vision. A sound that began as the soft murmur of the ocean in a sea-shell soon built to the deafening shriek of a jet engine. The nimbus between us went white, blinding in its radiance,
and tendrils of ghost-light radiated from the newborn star, crawling over the pavement like spectral serpents.

Cracks appeared in the street and overpass as the concrete and asphalt was torn from within by unseen stresses. The streetlights to either side of us blew out all at once, showering the street with electrical sparks and broken glass. A manhole cover was ripped from its moorings with the sound of a tolling bell and launched into the air on a column of golden light.

The juice burned through me and it felt like the shuddering convulsions of an orgasm as I hurled it into the arcane conflagration. Then I saw Wale falter. He wobbled and dipped a little in the air as his levitation spell weakened and nearly failed. I smiled and pressed the attack, abandoning all but the bare minimum of defense. The brilliant star that turned and pulsed between us began to move, slowly at first and then picking up speed. It moved toward Simeon Wale.