They inventoried their equipment next. Considerable ammo had vanished along with Andy’s jacket. She kept a pocketful of loose matches, a couple glowsticks, a dozen shells, Uncle Emmet’s shotgun, a plastic penguin, and Pierce. Pierce was the name she had just given to the pickax, the tool-slash-accessory-slash–slasher weapon that had become her dearest item in their arsenal. Kerri carried her assault rifle and her knife. Tim held a dying glowstick and looked fairly concerned about the amount of wound-licking he had pending.
After that, they charted out the rest of the underground tunnel system, going back through Debo?n’s grave and following the rest of the spiral cavern, past the door to the circular chamber and the necrotheque. As expected, it ended at another door opening into the lower basement, next to the hatch through which they had emerged from the mines the previous afternoon. The bookcases they had dumped over the hatch had been bashed away from the inside. Tim, chest wrapped in Kerri’s blood-smeared checkered shirt, inspected the area and seemed to corroborate that wheezers had surged up that way, and retreated down later.
From that point, Kerri had no trouble finding their way back upstairs, as they did before. Some sixty seconds later, the three of them resurfaced through the door under the main stairs, inside Debo?n Mansion.
The house, at that point, shuddered lightly—not an earthquake so much as a passing subway, a slow double-bass note that hardly rocked the frames on the wall. Tim raised his one whole ear and let go a most embarrassed whine.
“I missed you too,” Andy told the mansion when the tremor subsided.
From there on, Kerri had to tut Tim away from the decomposing carcasses, starting with the pair at the foot of the stairs. The smell, as they stealth-walked up to the second floor, was something not even the language of the mole people under Manhattan would have words for.
The ruinscape in the corridor upstairs was worthy of post-Godzilla Tokyo. By then, even Tim avoided lowering his snout as they squelched through the trapdoor room and into the oxygen tank storage. The battlefield there was literally flooded in a quarter inch of black jelly, polka-dotted with islands of scaly bodies shining like rotten fish under the moonlight.
Go dark now, Andy mimed to the team, switching off her flashlight. Kerri nodded and clutched her rifle firmly. Tim led the way toward one of the gaping holes and into the narrow passageway between the walls.
Even he had trouble negotiating the corners; the girls were forced to sidestep. They didn’t take any wrong turns before Tim spotted the flex-duct conducting the oxygen that was to be their white rabbit. They encountered further challenges climbing up to the third floor, especially with Tim, but the Weimaraner didn’t even whimper when Andy had to pull him up by the collar. Even the dog had a gut feeling that some very old open business was about to be closed.
Around the final corner, some light sifted through a few accidental peepholes in the woodwork. Kerri was surprised to realize it was electric light. Which, together with a new, peculiar smell in the air, made her raise a suspicious eyebrow.
“I can see Nate,” Andy whispered.
The sound of footsteps hushed them down. Slow, heavy, alert footsteps.
Kerri needed only to touch an atom on Tim’s head to make him repress a growl. Andy peeked through the smallest woodworm hole in the wall.
A cloaked figure was roaming around the attic. He had stopped idly by the alchemist workbench, gazing over the pots and urns out the southward window, where night was inappreciably beginning to dissipate: a teaspoon of predawn dissolved in a black ocean.
He walked another three steps to his left and fronted Nate. Their faces were obscured; Andy could make out that Nate was standing against a wooden beam and he neither moved nor uttered a sound. The necromancer had his hood up. He contemplated Nate, hands behind his back, with the curiosity of a visitor in a museum.
He then turned around and looked at her.
He stayed in that spot, for almost a minute, contemplating the blank wall in front of him like it was a mural.
He walked closer, examining a detail, stopping one step short of the woodwork.
He raised an inquisitive hand.
He breathed out.
He staggered back as Andy crashed through the wall, pickax in her left hand, shotgun in her right, a Mongolian city-raider cry out of her mouth summoning her redheaded and gray-furred sidekicks to battle. The entrance was so spectacularly off the Rodriguez scale, the necromancer literally fell on his ass.
When he started to rise, his hood cast back, the face beneath made the space-time continuum glitch.
Kerri lowered or dropped her gun, stunned, her heart dried up and crumbling to ashes at the sight of the lunar pallor, the Death Valley skin, the absolute surrender in Peter Manner’s eyes.
“Oh my God.”
Andy had barely a tenth of a second to acknowledge Nate in the middle of the room, comprehending he was not standing against a beam, but tied to it and gagged.
Then time resumed and Peter, disrespecting the dramatic pause he had conjured himself, sprang forward and slapped the shotgun barrel away from his face. Andy swung the shotgun back at him, but Peter hit her arm and she lost her grip on the weapon.
Kerri could do nothing but watch as Tim barked himself sore and Andy and Peter engaged in hand-to-hand combat, his hands vipering to clutch her wrists, her arms fending off six hits a second before she remembered her other limbs and kicked Peter’s knee, snapping the bone and gaining a microwindow to grip the pickax and try to drive it into the enemy’s heart.
KERRI: No, Andy, NO!!
On his knees, Peter raised his arms, caught her wrists and twisted them sharply, and Andy spun in the air and landed on her feet and took Peter for a spin to the floor and rose a second before he did. She juggled the pickax to her left hand and stepped on his thigh and swung it in an uppercut, and Peter blocked her left with his right and his left on the handle, stopping the point of the pickax an inch from his liver.
And the next second had them still locked in that position, forces equal, contenders’ arms trembling under the torque in their muscles.
“Andy, stop!” Kerri begged, barely keeping Tim from jumping onto the cloaked man and tearing him apart. “It’s him! It’s Peter!”
ANDY: Peter died in Hollywood! He wouldn’t be doing this!
KERRI: Andy, don’t kill him!
Peter’s eyes shifted to Kerri. Despite the strenuous tension and the gritted teeth, despite putting everything he had into that fight, his countenance had been that of total defeat from the very beginning.
KERRI: Peter, what did you want to tell me on the phone?
ANDY: Kerri, it’s not him!
KERRI: Pete, tell me, please!
ANDY: I gotta kill him!
KERRI: Don’t kill him!!
Tim was barking beyond his pain threshold. Andy sought the tiebreak vote.
ANDY: Nate!
NATE: (Muffled shout.)
ANDY: Do I kill him or not?!
KERRI: No! Pete, what did you wanna tell me on the phone?!
ANDY: Nate! One stomp he lives, two stomps he dies!
KERRI: Pete, speak! Say something!
Peter, with all of his strength channeled to deadlock Andy’s, but his hazel eyes anchored to Kerri’s, mouthed only two words.
Nate stomped the floor once.
I’m. Sorry.
And twice.
Then Andy headbutted Peter, kicked his arm out of the way, and embedded Pierce under his sternum.