“Huh?”
“Don’t you remember?” Jimmy turned his head, met my eyes. “Getting into that house is what we came here for.”
We had monsters to the north, monsters to the south; the adrenaline was pumping so fast all I could think of was which one I was going to stick first, then how I would roll, kick and nail the next. It took me several beats to comprehend what Jimmy had said and realize he was right.
I lowered my knife, flipped it over in my hand so I was holding the sharp side and offered it to the nearest of the walking dead.
“Take me to your leader,” I said.
CHAPTER 23
“They move pretty well for zombies,” I muttered.
The revenants had accepted our knives with little more than a shrug, then bound our hands behind us with golden chains, which made me think they’d been waiting for us. I didn’t like that thought one bit.
They looked like real, live people. No rotting parts. No zombie smell. They hadn’t said much—though they could talk: “Come here.” “Hands behind your back.” “Move.”
“You sure about them?” I asked Jimmy as we marched down the asphalt that led out of town, revenants before us, revenants behind us, but no one really close enough to hear us, especially since we’d put our heads together like thirteen-year-old girls at a slumber party and begun to whisper.
“Yeah.” He twitched one shoulder, then hissed when the golden chains slid along his wrists and smoke rose from his flesh. “I’m pretty good at sensing the undead. They might not be vampires, but they’re definitely the dead come to life.”
“So maybe they’re just zombies.” Had I actually used the phrase “just zombies”? “Not some apocalyptic portent.”
“Believe me, they’re an apocalyptic portent.” Jimmy took a slow, deep breath, careful not to rattle his chains, then glanced at the revenants. But none of the walking dead appeared to care if the two of us had a nice long chat. “You’ve heard about the four horsemen?” I nodded. “They arrive when the first of seven seals is broken.”
“Seals on what?”
“In Revelation, they’re on a scroll.” He scowled at the revenants. “But that scroll represents something else. The first rider comes on a white horse. Some say it’s Jesus; most say the opposite.”
“The Antichrist.”
“Yep. And if the rider appears when a seal is broken and that rider is the Antichrist, what do you think the seal was on?”
“Hell,” I answered.
“Give the girl a gold star.”
“How did the seal get broken?”
“Hard to say, and it doesn’t really matter. What’s done is done, and we have to deal with the results.”
He was right. No sense crying over spilled demons.
“So the seal broke,” I said. “Hell opened; the demons flew free.” Now my gaze went to the revenants. “Where do they come in?”
“The first horseman is bent on conquest. Some say peaceful, but who knows?”
“And the second?”
“Red horse, guy with a sword. Makes men kill one another and removes peace from the earth.”
“Same guy?”
“I think so.”
“To conquer with peace,” I said, “you’d need a huge army.”
“Walk tall and carry a big stick.”
“Exactly. Then to spread war throughout the earth, that army would come in very handy.”
“He moves from threatening war,” Jimmy said, “to unleashing it.”
“Where do you get a huge army when you’ve been doing crosswords in Tartarus since the beginning of time?” My gaze slid to the revenants, whose footsteps sounded more like goosesteps with every block we walked.
“You raise them from the dead,” Jimmy said.
“So many bodies, so little time,” I agreed, “with the added plus of their eternal gratitude.”
That I’d seen the dead rising as the Phoenix ran over their graves, in her possession a book that contained information that would allow her to control all the demons, was looking less and less like a coincidence. In the “Who Will Be the Antichrist?” sweepstakes, I think we had a winner. Except—
“If she can control the demons, why doesn’t she?”
Jimmy didn’t answer. When I glanced at him, he was peering into the gloom. I followed his gaze.
The house rose out of a swaying field of moon-tinged grass. Huge, like the revenant had said, the red brick dull with age, the once creamy mortar jaundiced from the elements, the paint around the boarded windows peeling. The front porch listed to the right; the steps creaked threateningly as the revenants followed us inside.
There, what had once been gorgeous hardwood floors were now buckled and uneven, the walls marred by leaks and cracks. A chandelier still hung in the entryway, swaying as the breeze blew in behind us; the crystals rubbed together, the sound so light and lonely it made me nostalgic. For what, I didn’t know.