Undead to the World (37 page)

“Good to know,” I say. “Maybe we should go check on her. We could use another ally.”

Cassius is already headed for the door. “After which we should proceed to the highway
site. We need to get through it as soon as we can; it’s our ticket home, and with
Ahaseurus dead it won’t stay open forever.”

I hesitate. “Are you sure we should run? Ahaseurus’s plan—”

“Was to overrun this world with pire and thropes, yes. You’ve taken care of the thrope
problem, and my status as the so-called “master” vampire should give me a psychic
link to any other pires created from my blood. I don’t sense any; whomever my doppelgänger
turned, they must have been destroyed.”

Well, that’s good news, I guess, though I’m starting to feel sorry for the townspeople
caught up in this. Okay, a lot of them belonged to an evil cult, but some of them
were probably innocents victimized by Ahaseurus, hapless extras suddenly cast as players
from my past.

I shake off the surge of guilt. Wrong time, wrong place. I’ll revisit the feeling
later, with a good bottle of scotch, some solitude, and a very dark room. Right now,
we have to move.

We march out to the car. There’s something in the rear window that catches my eye,
though it takes me a second to recognize it: fluffy white stuffing from the back seat.

“She’s free!” I shout, pulling my gun. Charlie has the shotgun up and ready, while
Cassius spins around and looks back at the house—which, it turns out, is exactly where
she is, perched on the edge of the eaves. She launches herself straight at Cassius,
knocking him over with her momentum.

“Go!” Cassius yells as they grapple. “I’ll meet you there!”

And then they’re tumbling across the street, Shaka doing her best to claw his head
off, Cassius cooly and methodically using kicks, punches, elbows, and knees to inflict
as much damage as he can. Our guns are useless; there’s too big a risk of hitting
the wrong target.

I swear, then jump in the front seat of the car. Charlie joins me. I start it up,
gun the engine, and swerve onto the road. I have to trust Cassius; as long as he protects
his neck and keeps Shaka from getting her paws on anything pointy and wooden, he’ll
be okay. By the same estimation, he probably can’t kill her—not unless he finds some
silver or manages to decapitate her. Fighting her is a strategic move, designed to
stall her while we get away; he’ll disengage as soon as he can, follow our trail out
of town—

Something smashes onto the roof of the car.

For a second I think we’ve been hit by a falling tree or a meteorite—hey, in this
town either one is possible—but then a pale hand gropes over the windshield from above.
“Keep going!” Cassius yells.

I glance in the rearview. An extremely pissed-off werewolf is loping after us. Through
cunning or dumb luck—and knowing Cassius, I’m pretty sure it’s the former—he’s gotten
his opponent to
throw
him at us. Or maybe she just hit him so hard it launched him like a missile in the
right direction.

Either way, I’m not going to look a gift pire in the fangs. I stomp on the accelerator,
wondering if it’s possible to outrun her.

The answer is: yes and no. In town, where I have to contend with corners, I can’t
get up enough speed; she’s gaining on us steadily. On the highway I’ll stand a chance,
but I have to get there first.

Charlie smashes out his window with the butt of the shotgun, leans out, and blasts
away in the African Queen’s general direction. I guess he must have tagged her, because
she starts to zig and zag, bounding off mailboxes and vehicles more like an ape than
a canine.

It buys me enough time to get to the main road, the one that connects to the highway.
I floor the gas pedal and Shaka finally falls behind in the rearview mirror.

And then I see what’s waiting for me, just outside of town.

The road is lined on either side with bizarre, stunted trees shaped like giant candy
canes. Each is about eight feet high, composed of different-colored strands wound
around each other; the strands start out thick at the base and grow increasingly slender,
the whole structure curving over at the top and tapering to maybe half an inch in
diameter—the thickness of a piece of rope.

Rope that ends in a hangman’s noose.

A body sways from the curved tip of every tree. I recognize Zev first, not from his
distorted features so much as the clothes he’s wearing. His toes almost brush the
ground, creating the illusion that he’s standing on his tiptoes, maybe about to do
a pirouette.

But he’s only the first. I see Don Prince, the owner of the hardware store.

Brad Varney, my transvestite mailman.

Mayor Leo.

And many, many others … people I knew or thought I did, all the familiar faces you
see day after day in a small town. Men, women, children. My paperboy. The guy who
drives the snowplow. That plump woman with the five kids. The old couple who always
smile when they pass me on the street and apparently don’t know a word of English.

All dead. All dangling at the end of rope-trees that apparently sprouted overnight:
bastard hybrids composed of roots, underground wires, telephone cable, garden hoses,
bright orange extension cords. Strangled by the mundane, by the sinews and tendons
that hold together modern existence. Crimson lightning dances overhead, now the only
source of illumination in a black sky. I feel like I’m driving into hell.

But I’m not. I’m driving
out
of it. I keep telling myself that as I check the rearview mirror nervously. The African
Queen is barely visible behind us, now in full wolf form and tearing after us as fast
as she can. I assume Cassius is still on the roof, though I can’t really tell.

There’s a single traffic barrier across the road ahead, a yellow and black–striped
sawhorse with a blinking orange light mounted on it. It looks absurd and out of place,
like a
BACK IN FIVE MINUTES
sign on the Pearly Gates. Beyond the barricade is … nothing. No bulldozers, no backhoes,
just a vast, yawning pit that the storm seems to be belching out of like smoke from
an active volcano.

I screech to a halt, grab the spell books and jump out of the car. Cassius leaps down
from the roof and joins me; it takes Charlie a few seconds longer with his bad leg.
We’ve got maybe thirty seconds before the furious werewolf catches up with us; I toss
the spell books at Cassius, then brace my gun arm on the hood of the car and aim down
the road. “Read
fast.
”

Charlie is right there beside me, the shotgun snugged to his shoulder. “Scattergun
will work best if I try to take out her legs,” he says. “You’ve got the pistol; aim
for her center mass.”

I narrow my eyes and flick a glance at him. “That’s awfully knowledgeable for someone
who just learned how to handle a gun.” Charlie, like everyone on Thropirelem, doesn’t
know squat about guns.

“I’m a quick study.”

“Not that quick. Some of Allen’s memories must be bleeding through—maybe because the
magic around here is unraveling.”

He hesitates. “Could be.”

I know my partner. I know when he’s not telling me something. And at times like this—all
my senses heightened by adrenaline, my instincts going full throttle in sheer survival
mode—I know a lot more. Without really thinking about it, I realize exactly what it
is he’s hiding from me.

“You love me,” I say.

He doesn’t meet my eyes, doesn’t so much as twitch. He could be made of stone.

“Charlie Allen, I mean.
He
loves me. He loves me and you can tell and
you’re not mocking me.
” I say this last phrase in total disbelief, because it implies a whole world—a whole
universe—of consequences that I am simply not prepared to think about at this point
in time.

“Maybe later,” Charlie manages. “If we’re both, you know, still alive.”

Cassius intones three words, none of which I can spell or even pronounce. There’s
a noise behind me like a rope snapping taut. I risk a glance.

Twenty feet away, the Gallowsman hangs suspended over the pit, the rope around his
neck extending straight up into the storm itself. He looks much as I imagined him,
a long, lean figure dressed in rags, but his head is erect instead of lolling to the
side. The noose is sunk deeply into his flesh, and every inch of skin above it is
a horrible mottled green and purple, as if his entire face were a single bruise. His
eyes bulge from their sockets and his lips are grotesquely thick and distended, like
blisters about to pop. His hair is long and black and greasy.

“Thank God,” I say wearily. “I thought you were going to look like my fifth-grade
math teacher or something.”

“
I am not your nightmare,
” he hisses. “
I am everyone’s.
”

The sound of Charlie’s shotgun going off interrupts our witty banter. I snap my head
around just in time to see the black, lupine form of the African Queen hurtling straight
at us. She springs—not for Cassius or me or Charlie, but over our heads and at the
Gallowsman himself.

She never makes it.

From my perspective, it’s like she leaped into an invisible wind tunnel, a blast of
air so powerful that it not only makes every strand of fur on her body stream backward,
it also stops her in mid-leap.

The Gallowsman is pointing a single, outstretched arm at her; scarlet electricity
crackles down the rope from the storm above, dancing around his neck like a second
noose.

The Queen’s fur isn’t streaming backward anymore; now it’s all pointing straight up,
like an angry black cat plugged into a wall socket. Fur is nothing but tiny little
strings, after all, and that’s what the Gallowsman controls. He’s got her by the short
hairs, the long hairs, and all the hairs in between.

She snarls, writhing and twisting in midair, and I can see huge tufts of fur pulling
right out of her flesh, some of them still attached to patches of skin. Must hurt
like hell, but it won’t kill her; she might even have a shot at freeing herself. I
make a silent vow never to complain about waxing my legs again.

Cassius is chanting now in a low, sonorous voice. The Gallowsman gestures with his
other hand, and I hear something ripping itself free under the hood of the car. A
multicolored rope made of fan belts, electrical harness wiring, and brake cables snakes
its way from beneath the vehicle and slithers toward Cassius. I shoot at it, but it’s
hard to hit.

The African Queen is ripping free of her own pelt in a frenzy, spattering blood everywhere.
I shield my mouth and eyes; a previous thrope experience may have left me with an
immunity to the virus that lives on werewolf claws, but I still have to watch out
for other modes of infection.

The fur that’s no longer attached to the Queen isn’t just dropping to the ground—it’s
weaving itself into a long, thick black rope in midair. At the same moment that it
loops around the thrope’s neck, the autoconda wriggles up Cassius’s body and around
his throat. Both yank tight; Cassius’s incantation stops.

“You fight a war for no purpose,”
the Gallowsman intones.
“He who summoned me is gone. I care not for his plans. You may go.”

He flicks his wrist. The African Queen, her body now covered in more blood than fur,
falls to earth. The black rope begins to haul her toward the edge of the pit; she
fights it every step of the way.

I can’t worry about her, though, not when Cassius is being throttled. I know a sharp
blade can sever a pire’s head from his body, but I’m unclear on the rules about garroting.
Cassius doesn’t need air to breathe, only to speak—but a cord can cut through a neck,
too, given the application of a strong enough force, and the Gallowsman seems to have
plenty of that.

I snap a scythe open as I sprint. Cassius isn’t even trying to free himself, just
focusing on the spell book and the graphic novel; he’s got one open in each hand,
and his lips are still moving.

I get the point of a scythe between the cable and his neck and cut through the strands.
They immediately reweave themselves, and I have to cut through them again—this time,
I yank the cable free and pull it as far as I can from Cassius’s neck; it wriggles
and squirms, trying to get back to its objective. It’s like wrestling satanic kudzu.

I hear a howl of anger and desperation behind me, one that quickly fades away to silence.
I look back. The African Queen is gone.

I chop at the cable-snake. It reforms again and again, but I’m buying Cassius time.
Charlie fires the shotgun, putting round after round into the Gallowsman’s chest.
Cassius resumes chanting, but I can’t hear him over the roar of ordnance.

Which doesn’t seem to be affecting its target at all. More crimson lighting arcs and
crackles down the rope that leads from the Gallowsman to the storm, and I realize
what’s going on: Ahaseurus turned the Gallowsman into a battery for mystic energy,
but with the sorcerer gone he’s started tapping into that energy for himself. He may
not have the kind of world-conquering ambition the Big A had, but he’s now just as
powerful … and he’s plugged into a dimensional nexus that will let him travel to any
number of alternate worlds.

Where he’ll do what? Why, the same thing he’s always done, but on a bigger scale.
He thrives on bad luck and despair, so the more there is the more powerful he becomes.
I have a brief, intense vision of the President of the United States, weeping in suicidal
remorse as he enters the nuclear activation codes.…

“
You,
” the Gallowsman says, turning his attention to Charlie. “
Puppet man. I see the strings that run from you, that stretch across the dimensional
divide. They are
here.” He reaches out, makes a grasping motion in the air—then
yanks
.

Charlie lurches forward like he was pushed—no, more like he was
pulled.
He drops the shotgun. He staggers, catches himself, then shakes his head. “What?
What’s—what’s going on?” He looks around in utter confusion, and I realize that my
partner just got kicked off this dimensional plane.