Then again, maybe I wouldn’t have to. I remembered the look on her face when I reminded her of Circe. And her slip, how she’d denied her sisters—plural—before I’d said the word. Whoever she was before the Enemy corrupted her…part of her was still in there. Close to the surface but trapped under the ice and drowning, trying to get out.
Landmarks started to look familiar. The great steel vats rusting away in the dark, conveyor belts, engines for sorting and shredding the city’s cast-off waste. The echo of heavy, jerky footsteps up ahead jolted me to a stop. I didn’t think the night crew were Ecko-style walking dead, but something was off about these guys. I changed course, darting down a side passage.
A pair of swinging doors opened onto a break room. Rumpled magazines littered the long Formica tables, and a soda machine hummed away in the dark. A dry-erase calendar on the wall charted employee birthdays and what day the communal fridge would be cleaned out. Aggressively mundane, an artifact of the day shift. On the far side of the break room, a stub of a hallway ended in a door marked Emergency Exit Only. A sticker on the push bar warned that opening it would trigger an alarm.
Did I chance it? No telling what was on the other side, beyond a shot at freedom. I ran through the layout of the lot in my head. The perimeter fence had been topped with spools of concertina wire. Once I was outside, I’d have to fight my way to the main gate, or jack a truck and crash the fence.
Speakers crackled to life. Elmer’s voice drifted from a recessed grille in the ceiling, a slow and singsong chant.
“Dan. Daaan. Daniel. You see, this is exactly why I didn’t want to leave you alone for a second, much less allow Ms. Fleiss to take you outside this facility. I have far too much respect for you as an adversary to give you an opportunity like that. She’s looking for you, by the way. I hadn’t seen her other form before. I’m impressed, I have to say. She’s very fast for a…well, a plus-sized woman.”
Elmer’s nasal giggle echoed through the empty hallways. I put my ear to the emergency door, trying to get any kind of a fix on the other side. If Fleiss was in battle mode, I needed to be anywhere but here.
“You’ll be happy to know we agreed on a solution,” Elmer said. “Once she catches you, Ms. Fleiss is going to amputate your arms and legs, then sew your lips shut. You won’t be playing any tricks after that. And you’ll be nicely compact for travel.”
I shoved the emergency door’s bar and pushed on through. Crisp, cold night air embraced me under the halogen glow of a loading dock. A couple of Elmer’s men were working on a garbage truck—the hood up but the engine humming, ready to roll. I formed my plan in a heartbeat: kill them, steal the truck, blast through the perimeter fence at full speed. The second I was clear I’d call Caitlin and meet up with the convoy, then do a one-eighty with some serious backup on my side. A spark of magic spurred my deck of cards to life. They leaped from my pocket in a fluttering stream, landing in my left palm and crackling with static electricity.
One of the slack-faced men turned my way. He threw his shoulders back, his torso wobbling like his spine had turned to jelly, and opened his mouth wide. His jaw cracked, disgorging a fat, filth-brown roach where his tongue should have been. Then he let out a shriek louder than a jet engine and so shrill it felt like a pair of icepicks had stabbed into my eardrums. The garbage truck’s windows burst, imploding in a glittering spray of glass.
His partner spun and dropped to all fours, bouncing on his hands and feet as his maw yawned open. His tongue-roach quivered its mandibles at me as he joined in the skull-pounding screech. They charged as one, loping across the asphalt, fast as lions on the savanna.
I hauled the emergency door shut. The latch clicked a heartbeat before a body slammed against it from the other side. The reinforced wood rattled and shook under a hurricane of frenzied punches. I wasn’t sure how long the door would hold up. I only knew I wasn’t getting out that way. I turned and ran, deeper into the complex, closer to the immortal monster that was hunting for me.
17.
Staying mobile was my best hope. A janitor’s broom closet beckoned to me, offering the temptation of a hiding place, but that was a sucker bet: sooner or later, either Fleiss or Elmer or his “night crew” would find me and drag me out of hiding, and then I’d be finished. Once Caitlin and my reinforcements rolled in I might have a fighting chance at living through this. Until then, nothing mattered but running down the clock.
A lonely doorway opened onto a stairwell. It rose up like a fat chimney along the back of the building, the concrete steps lined with black rubber runners. I bounded up two at a time, grabbing the iron rail with one hand and my phone with the other, thumbing the speed-dial.
“I’m with Jennifer,” Caitlin said. “We’re five minutes out. She rounded up a number of her Calles friends, and most of Winslow’s associates just rendezvoused with us on the road. They’re a bit inebriated, and eager for a fight.”
“They’re going to get one. Warn everybody: this necromancer goes in for some extreme body modification. His crew is faster and stronger than they look.”
“Noted. Where are you?”
“On the move.”
I rounded the next landing. A long, narrow window reinforced with chicken wire looked out over the company lot. Shapes bounded across the puddles of stark yellow light on all fours, more animal than man, the night crew hunting for prey.
“Gonna try the roof,” I told her. “I’m hoping they won’t think to look for me up there.”
I hung up without telling her the second part of my plan. If they did find me, I wasn’t going to let Fleiss take me alive. A three-story drop onto the asphalt was a better way to go than anything she had planned for me.
I burst out onto a flat rooftop covered in fine white gravel, stumbling to a stop, and put my hands on my knees as I doubled over and took deep breaths. My heart pounded a staccato rhythm against my ribs. Blood roared in my ears louder than the steady hum of the boxy air-conditioning units that studded the roof.
I could see the lights of the Strip from here. So bright, offering a world of normality and safety so close I could almost reach out and touch it. I could be sitting in a casino bar right now, nursing a Jack and Coke, or out strolling with the tourist crowds and enjoying the night air.
But I was here, trapped on a roof, neck-deep in a world of monsters, torture, and death.
“The fuck am I doing with my life?” I breathed.
It wasn’t a rhetorical question. I had kicked off the lethargy, the self-doubt, the ennui that kept me couch-surfing and doing nothing for months on end. That was a victory. But what was I doing with it? Assuming I survived to see daylight, was this really how I wanted to spend the rest of my life? Living by the gun, down in the nightmare underbelly of the world?
Was I capable of doing anything else?
A swarm of headlights flared on the access road, coming in hot. Philosophy class was over. I crouched down low and got as close to the rooftop’s edge as I dared.
A dirt-encrusted semi truck crashed the gate at sixty miles an hour, sending twisted metal flying in a shower of sparks. A pair of minivans in Calles brown and yellow—gunships, with the side doors yawning open so shooters could lean out and make the drive-by—were right on its tail, followed by a dozen Harleys. Their engines revved in a full-throated diesel shout.