The skull on the floor didn't move its lower jaw but it spoke all the same.
She picked up the thick bunch of cables in one hand and cut it with her hatchet. That killed the cancer woman, of course, her system couldn't function without the constant input of energy from the Source'
'Shut up for a second,' Dekalb hissed. His own voice was less than a whisper. It was the movement of a gnat's wings, with no strength behind it. 'There's something different. Something' bad.' His eyes went to Gary's skull again. The lower jaw' something was wrong with it.
So what Clark wanted, which was just vengeance, revenge for humanity, was achieved and she left, which makes you kind of wonder. Was she good or evil? Or maybe she just wanted to make up her own mind about things'
That jaw'it hadn't been there before. When Dekalb had still been alive, when he had taken Gary's head away from the fortress in Central Park, he had left the jawbone behind.
Gary had grown back an entire body part while he told his story.
Dekalb's eyes were clouded with decay, his vision poor at best. He looked closer. Had the skin on Gary's head smoothed out, erasing the old burn scars? Were those'had he seen movement in the empty eyesockets?
So she found Mael again and he told her, her name was Julie. He could be pretty generous when you did what he wanted. Maybe I was too hasty in eating him. He could have taught me so much more'
A rumbling vibration shook the room. A vast emergent noise'a whale turning over in the darkness below the ocean. A mountain falling down in another country. Except it wasn't a sound at all, was it? Dekalb felt it on the back of his neck.
The energy'the dark energy. It was rising, moving. Something'something dead was moving. Something undead. Dekalb peered between the blades of the turning fan, studied the wedges of yellow and purple light he could see, the featureless sky beyond his hiding place. Nothing there'the thin texture of stratospheric clouds, the soundless sky where no airplanes flew anymore, where no one went, cold and frozen and lifeless and empty as the day the earth began.
She kept coming east, but of course, you know what she must have found here. She never saw Mael Mag Och again, at least not that he remembers'
'I said shut up!' Dekalb croaked, summoning enough energy to look over his shoulder.
Gary looked back at him with bloodshot eyes.
Shivers of fear stabbed out of Dekalb's dry adrenal glands, making his kidneys ache. It was impossible. It was impossible but it was real. Somehow Gary was healing himself. Rejuvenating himself. The whole time while Dekalb had been absorbed in fanciful stories of invisible dead girls and armless freaks Gary had been making himself over and anew.
'What have you done?' Dekalb wheezed.
The skull on the floor rolled its eyes. You're imagining things, old man. Come lie down again and I'll tell you another story.
Dekalb summoned the mummies to take him down from his hooks but he didn't want to lie down on the catwalk again not with that' thing looking at him.
The mummies did his bidding. While Dekalb sat propped up against a girder they searched the supply closets. One of them returned with the necessary tool. She stepped up behind the skull and raised her arms, rotten linen spilling away from her body, softened grey skin showing underneath.
I think you've really lost it this time, Dekalb. There's nothing to'
She brought the sledgehammer down, brought its five pound head down on the skull, shattering the bones, spilling dry dark brain matter across the floor. The bloodshot eyes spun comically in their sockets and ended up pointing in two random directions, neither of them looking at Dekalb.