NEW PRETTY TOWN

The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit.

Of course, Tally thought, you'd have to feed your cat only salmon-flavored cat food for a while, to get the pinks right. The scudding clouds did look a bit fishy, rippled into scales by a high-altitude wind. As the light faded, deep blue gaps of night peered through like an upside-down ocean, bottomless and cold.

Any other summer, a sunset like this would have been beautiful. But nothing had been beautiful since Peris turned pretty. Losing your best friend sucks, even if it's only for three months and two days.

•  •  •

Tally Youngblood was waiting for darkness.

She could see New Pretty Town through her open window. The party towers were already lit up, and snakes of burning torches marked flickering pathways through the pleasure gardens. A few hot-air balloons pulled at their tethers against the darkening pink sky, their passengers shooting safety fireworks at other balloons and passing parasailers. Laughter and music skipped across the water like rocks thrown with just the right spin, their edges just as sharp against Tally's nerves.

Around the outskirts of the city, cut off from town by the black oval of the river, everything was in darkness. Everyone ugly was in bed by now.

Tally took off her interface ring and said, "Good night."

"Sweet dreams, Tally," said the room.

She chewed up a toothbrush pill, punched her pillows, and shoved an old portable heater-one that produced about as much warmth as a sleeping, Tally-size human being-under the covers.

Then she crawled out the window.

Outside, with the night finally turning coal black above her head, Tally instantly felt better. Maybe this was a stupid plan, but anything was better than another night awake in bed feeling sorry for herself. On the familiar leafy path down to the water's edge, it was easy to imagine Peris stealing silently behind her, stifling laughter, ready for a night of spying on the new pretties. Together. She and Peris had figured out how to trick the house minder back when they were twelve, when the three-month difference in their ages seemed like it would never matter.

"Best friends for life," Tally muttered, fingering the tiny scar on her right palm.

The water glistened through the trees, and she could hear the wavelets of a passing river skimmer's wake slapping at the shore. She ducked, hiding in the reeds. Summer was always the best time for spying expeditions. The grass was high, it was never cold, and you didn't have to stay awake through school the next day.

Of course, Peris could sleep as late as he wanted now. Just one of the advantages of being pretty.

The old bridge stretched massively across the water, its huge iron frame as black as the sky. It had been built so long ago that it held up its own weight, without any support from hoverstruts. A million years from now, when the rest of the city had crumbled, the bridge would probably remain like a fossilized bone.

Unlike the other bridges into New Pretty Town, the old bridge couldn't talk-or report trespassers, more importantly. But even silent, the bridge had always seemed very wise to Tally, as quietly knowing as some ancient tree.

Her eyes were fully adjusted to the darkness now, and it took only seconds to find the fishing line tied to its usual rock. She yanked it, and heard the splash of the rope tumbling from where it had been hidden among the bridge supports. She kept pulling until the invisible fishing line turned into wet, knotted cord. The other end was still tied to the iron framework of the bridge. Tally pulled the rope taut and lashed it to the usual tree.

She had to duck into the grass once more as another river skimmer passed. The people dancing on its deck didn't spot the rope stretched from bridge to shore. They never did. New pretties were always having too much fun to notice little things out of place.

When the skimmer's lights had faded, Tally tested the rope with her whole weight. One time it had pulled loose from the tree, and both she and Peris had swung downward, then up and out over the middle of the river before falling off, tumbling into the cold water. She smiled at the memory, realizing she would rather be on that expedition-soaking wet in the cold with Peris-than dry and warm tonight, but alone.

Hanging upside down, hands and knees clutching the knots along the rope, Tally pulled herself up into the dark framework of the bridge, then stole through its iron skeleton and across to New Pretty Town.

•  •  •

She knew where Peris lived from the one message he had bothered to send since turning pretty. Peris hadn't given an address, but Tally knew the trick for decoding the random-looking numbers at the bottom of a ping. They led to someplace called Garbo Mansion in the hilly part of town.

Getting there was going to be tricky. In their expeditions, Tally and Peris had always stuck to the waterfront, where vegetation and the dark backdrop of Uglyville made it easy to hide. But now Tally was headed into the center of the island, where floats and revelers populated the bright streets all night. Brand-new pretties like Peris always lived where the fun was most frantic.

Tally had memorized the map, but if she made one wrong turn, she was toast. Without her interface ring, she was invisible to vehicles. They'd just run her down like she was nothing.

Of course, Tally was nothing here.

Worse, she was ugly. But she hoped Peris wouldn't see it that way. Wouldn't see her that way.

Tally had no idea what would happen if she got caught. This wasn't like being busted for "forgetting" her ring, skipping classes, or tricking the house into playing her music louder than allowed. Everyone did that kind of stuff, and everyone got busted for it. But she and Peris had always been very careful about not getting caught on these expeditions. Crossing the river was serious business.

It was too late to worry now, though. What could they do to her, anyway? In three months she'd be a pretty herself.

Tally crept along the river until she reached a pleasure garden, and slipped into the darkness beneath a row of weeping willows. Under their cover she made her way alongside a path lit by little guttering flames.

A pretty couple wandered down the path. Tally froze, but they were clueless, too busy staring into each other's eyes to see her crouching in the darkness. Tally silently watched them pass, getting that warm feeling she always got from looking at a pretty face. Even when she and Peris used to spy on them from the shadows, giggling at all the stupid things the pretties said and did, they couldn't resist staring. There was something magic in their large and perfect eyes, something that made you want to pay attention to whatever they said, to protect them from any danger, to make them happy. They were so . . . pretty.

The two disappeared around the next bend, and Tally shook her head to clear the mushy thoughts away. She wasn't here to gawk. She was an infiltrator, a sneak, an ugly. And she had a mission.

The garden stretched up into town, winding like a black river through the bright party towers and houses. After a few more minutes of creeping, she startled a couple hidden among the trees (it was a pleasure garden, after all), but in the darkness they couldn't see her face, and only teased her as she mumbled an apology and slipped away. She hadn't seen too much of them, either, just a tangle of perfect legs and arms.

Finally, the garden ended, a few blocks from where Peris lived.

Tally peered out from behind a curtain of hanging vines. This was farther than she and Peris had ever been together, and as far as her planning had taken her. There was no way to hide herself in the busy, well-lit streets. She put her fingers up to her face, felt the wide nose and thin lips, the too-high forehead and tangled mass of frizzy hair. One step out of the underbrush and she'd be spotted. Her face seemed to burn as the light touched it. What was she doing here? She should be back in the darkness of Uglyville, awaiting her turn.

But she had to see Peris, had to talk to him. She wasn't quite sure why, exactly, except that she was sick of imagining a thousand conversations with him every night before she fell asleep. They'd spent every day together since they were littlies, and now . . . nothing. Maybe if they could just talk for a few minutes, her brain would stop talking to imaginary Peris. Three minutes might be enough to hold her for three months.

Tally looked up and down the street, checking for side yards to slink through, dark doorways to hide in. She felt like a rock climber facing a sheer cliff, searching for cracks and handholds.

The traffic began to clear a little, and she waited, rubbing the scar on her right palm. Finally, Tally sighed and whispered, "Best friends forever," and took a step forward into the light.

An explosion of sound came from her right, and she leaped back into the darkness, stumbling among the vines, coming down hard on her knees in the soft earth, certain for a few seconds that she'd been caught.

But the cacophony organized itself into a throbbing rhythm. It was a drum machine making its lumbering way down the street. Wide as a house, it shimmered with the movement of its dozens of mechanical arms, bashing away at every size of drum. Behind it trailed a growing bunch of revelers, dancing along with the beat, drinking and throwing their empty bottles to shatter against the huge, impervious machine.

Tally smiled. The revelers were wearing masks.

The machine was lobbing the masks out the back, trying to coax more followers into the impromptu parade: devil faces and horrible clowns, green monsters and gray aliens with big oval eyes, cats and dogs and cows, faces with crooked smiles or huge noses.

The procession passed slowly, and Tally pulled herself back into the vegetation. A few of the revelers passed close enough that the sickly sweetness from their bottles filled her nose. A minute later, when the machine had trundled half a block farther, Tally jumped out and snatched up a discarded mask from the street. The plastic was soft in her hand, still warm from having been stamped into shape inside the machine a few seconds before.

Before she pressed it against her face, Tally realized that it was the same color as the cat-vomit pink of the sunset, with a long snout and two pink little ears. Smart adhesive flexed against her skin as the mask settled onto her face.

Tally pushed her way through the drunken dancers, out the other side of the procession, and ran down a side street toward Garbo Mansion, wearing the face of a pig.

ONE

It began as a soft pulling sensation, and grew violently in strength. The light went away fast. The world was speeding back towards me, a gigantic custard pie hurled by a universe determined to make me the butt of some cruel, cruel joke. I scrabbled for purchase with my astral fingers, desperately clawing for something to cling to, anything that would mean I wouldn’t have to go back down there. . .

But no. The universe refused to see things my way, and my spirit returned to my body like a punch in the gut.

I sat bolt upright, or at least tried to; my forehead discovered something hard and wooden overhead, and my skull fell back down with an audible crack. A handful of dust in my lungs interrupted my attempts to swear and I spent a few instructive moments in a wretched coughing fit, clutching at my head. I noticed that most of my hair was missing, and as my hands travelled down, that my face was thin and sunken.

Okay, I thought. I’m not going to panic. I’m going to take a deep breath—okay, I’m not going to take a deep breath, but I’m going to count to ten, and take stock, and I’m going to stay calm.

“I died,” I recalled, mouthing the words airlessly. “Oh well. Could happen to anyone. Everyone, even. And now I’ve come back to life. So I can’t exactly complain, can I? I’m in a coffin. That’s where they put dead people. It makes sense. Ho hum. There’s no air in here. La de dah. Who needs air? Not me, anymore, apparently. My body seems to have been wasting away for many years. Well I never.”

A loud rumbling from deep within the bowels of the earth shut me up. The ground shook violently. I could feel the spiders in my lungs clinging to alveoli for dear life.

“And there’s an earthquake going on. Fiddle de RAARGH LET ME OUT LET ME OUT—”

The nails were old and gave way almost instantly, but then there was something heavy on top of the coffin, pinning down the lid. I strained until both wood and limb were creaking like talkative garden gates, until finally I felt weight shifting, my lid flew off and I was catapulted bolt upright.

Light drilled uncomfortably into my long-unused retinas. Normal, boring torchlight, not the glorious holy light of recent memory. I knuckled away a succession of fat pink after-images and coughed up something that looked very much like a cobweb.

I was in a crypt. That made sense—I was dead, after all. The walls were lined with alcoves containing battered coffins like my own, mostly smashed open. The torches on the walls were freshly lit, and the thick piles of dust on the floor were disturbed by very recent track marks.

There came a clattering to my immediate right. I glanced over just in time to see the coffin that had been on top of mine burst open and a skeleton tumble out. “Khak!” it went. “Khakkhakh khakh!” Then it fell apart.

I was attempting to crawl along the ground away from it when another quake shook the crypt. A large portion of plaster and stone disassociated itself from the rest of the ceiling by an inch or two, and reddish dust rained down. “What the hell is going on?!” was what I tried to say, but my lungs were still dusty and it came out more like “Whrrf kkkrghhaff?!”

It did the trick, though. A grayish head peered around the corner of a nearby tunnel. It was a corpse, his complexion pale and scarred, one glassy eye dangling down a waxy cheek. His body had clearly been dead for quite a long time, but the message apparently hadn’t reached his brain.

“Oh, hello,” he said, his voice reverberating as if his throat was full of gravel. “Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

“No!” I had coughed out the last of the dust, but my voice was just as rough and raspy as his. “No I do not know what’s going on! I was dead! I kind of expected things to stop going on!”

“It’s just a bunch of us just woke up in here and no-one seems to know why.” He offered a hand and helped pull me to my feet. “You got off pretty lightly.”

“Got off lightly?!”

“All four limbs. Both eyes. Shame about your nose. But you should see the state of some of the others.”

I was fingering a rather ghastly triangular hole in the middle of my face when the room shook once again, in the way a human would say “Ahem.” With a noise like the enthusiastic mating of giant stone golems, the far wall buckled inwards and part of the floor gave way. The skeleton, still trying to stand up, fell from sight with a terrified “khakk,” followed by the remains of my coffin and presumably my nose.

“We’d best get out of here,” said my new friend. I nodded, took a step, and fell flat on my face. It would have probably been quite traumatic for a person with a nose, but fortunately I was ahead of the game there.

“Sorry,” he said, helping me up again. “You’re a bit wobbly. Expecting to wake up fresh and ready to go after being dead for a while would be a bit optimistic.”

“Well, yes. Expecting to wake up at all would have been a bit optimistic.”

“Hey, don’t take it out on me. I’m trying to help.”

Specifically, he was trying to help me run away from whatever was causing all the rumbling, and from the increasingly collapsing floor. Old and long-unused signals from my brain were having trouble making the long climb down my spinal column to my limbs. I stumbled through the underground chambers on my colleague’s shoulder, sensation returning to my feet and joints by tiny increments. The thought was sinking in with greater and greater certainty and considerably greater discomfort: I was dead. I was alive and dead at the same time. I was un-dead. My current biological status was aggravatingly inconsistent.

I had seen zombies before. There had been a necromancer’s tower in the village near my family farm and you’d sometimes see an undead slave lurching through the marketplace. On shopping days me and a few other kids used to flick bits of bread at them so that hungry seagulls would chase them around. And then later, at college, Mr. Everwind was in the habit of raising undead teaching assistants, and a popular hazing ritual was to steal the Undead Command Stone from the staff room and use it to make them pole dance on the school flagpole. I remembered how amusing it had been at the time to watch them move around as if their joints were held together with elastic bands. Now I just wanted to know how they had made it look so easy.

Getting to grips with myself would have to wait, because now the floor was rumbling continuously. We staggered through another archway moments before it cracked and into a wide nexus of passageways at the bottom of a steep flight of stairs. Moonlight shone invitingly down towards us, but in our current state, the steps might as well have been the north face of Mount Murdercruel. Several of my fellow undeads were milling around waiting for someone to take charge.

“Found another one,” said my helper, jiggling me.

“Ohh,” said a balding woman with no arms. “Look at this fancy dan with his four functioning limbs.”

“And his skin hardly flaking off,” said a man with no face on his skull.

“Aaa ih ee oo uh aaa,” said someone else with no lower jaw.

“I bet he could still maintain an erection,” grumbled a decrepit old corpse who probably had issues.

“Uh uh aaaa!”

Between us there were about six complete bodies, spread out over around ten individuals. There was more exposed bone and sinew on view than in a dumpster behind an abattoir, and everyone was wearing expensive funeral attire that had become faded and torn by the passage of time. The whole effect was rather like the aftermath of an explosion at a high-class dinner party.

For the first time I took a moment to examine myself properly. I was wearing what had probably once been a basic mage’s robe, creamy brown linen stitched into a pattern that the nearest convenient tailor to the funeral home had probably thought was mystic and artsy. Time, however, had not been kind to it. Both elbows were worn right through. Threads all over the garment had come unstitched, and now dangled shamefacedly from all over my body. The tailoring had been utterly spoiled by whatever thoughtless person had cut a huge slit in the back, from neck to arse.

A particularly loud clash of falling ceiling echoed through the subterranean halls, and the floor was starting to shake again. I and the assembled undead collectively realized that we were still far from safety. A section of nearby wall slid into the abyss that was all that remained of my tomb, and a huge cloud of dust billowed out.

Now half-blind and fighting off a powerful desire to lie down and go back to sleep I tottered over to the stairs, fell forward and began wildly flinging my elbows and knees upwards in an impromptu attempt at climbing.

“Look, he can even climb stairs!” said the man with no face, struggling to follow.

“God, life’s wasted on the young, isn’t it?!” said the woman with no arms.

The fellow with no lower jaw was probably planning to add something, but then the ground cracked open beneath his feet and he was swallowed by the earth with a tongue-flapping wail of fright.

It’s amazing how imminent peril can aid recovery from rigor mortis. I was making decent speed, and was already halfway to fresh air. At this rate I’d be perfectly fine as long as I was never called upon to do anything complicated, like shake someone’s hand or sit in a chair. The rumbling was turning into a roar, the stairs were starting to shift beneath my hands and feet, and small bits of rock were raining down upon us constantly. A much larger bit of rock decided to join in the fun and thundered down the steps, but it flew over me and collided wetly with someone I hadn’t had time to care about.

Being the most functional horrors present, I and the chap who’d found me were the first to reach the top. My arms and legs continued spinning through thin air for a few moments before I collapsed onto dead grass. A handful of the others were able to escape before the crypt entrance uttered a final impatient cough and caved in.

“Wait a second, I know this place,” said the man with no face, who had been the third to emerge. “This is the graveyard near Whitbury Farmstead. In Goodsoil County.”

I knew of Goodsoil County, but I had never been there in life, because of the rumors that circulated about the native farmers and what they got up to with domestic animals and unsuspecting travelers. It had not, as far as I could remember, been fingered as a dark and sinister place that oozed an atmosphere of tangible evil from every square foot of ground, but that was the sort of thing that could easily be overlooked if you were concentrating on keeping your private places away from backward rural folk.

The crypt had been the centerpiece of a vast graveyard that rolled away in all directions, a stark navy of gray stone slabs sailing upon an ocean of dead grass. It was hilly country, surrounded by a black pine forest from which emanated the growl of predators and the abruptly cut off squeals of their prey.

Once again, the ground began rumbling underneath me. Oh, for crying out loud, I thought. Was a single moment to myself too much to ask? I jumped back just as the dying grass split asunder and a zombie hand burst forth, flesh hanging from it like puff pastry from an aging apple turnover. It clawed the air for a moment, and an involuntary yelp of terror escaped from my lips. After that, though, it seemed to be having trouble, so my new colleagues and I helped pull it out, closely followed by the owner.

“Thanks,” he said, re-attaching his arm. “Why am I alive?”

The same question was occurring to the graveyard’s entire population, who were popping up like extremely fast-growing, foul-smelling daisies. That was what had caused the cave-ins, I realized: the graves were so packed together that the simultaneous stirring of their residents had caused massive trauma to the local geology. Of course, the huge green crystals probably weren’t helping, either.

They were sitting on makeshift towers made from metal girders, thin and flimsy-looking but tall enough to loom over the treetops, and which were erected at regular intervals around the graveyard’s perimeter. Mounted on the top of each tower was an irregular lump of green crystal—probably magical stone, judging by the way it glowed and the arcs of chartreuse lightning crackling around. As we watched, some unspoken signal caused the crystals to become connected for a brief second by a huge circle of green magical energy, which detached and drifted off into the sky like a smoke ring.

“This is necromantic magic,” I thought aloud.

“Well, DUH,” said someone.

“I mean, it has to be, but I’ve never seen anything like it. I didn’t think it was done with crystals. I thought it was all blood sacrifice and that kind of thing.”

I tapped my chin thoughtfully, felt exposed bone in my fingertips, and resumed taking stock of my current condition. My hands were skin and bone—in some places, just bone—and my flesh was discolored to a sickly grayish-green. None of my fingernails were less than an inch long. My toenails were poking out the front of my flimsy cloth boots. Miserably I unbuttoned the front of the robe and ran a clawed hand across my chest and belly. A deep scar ran diagonally across my torso, held together with rusty metal staples. At least my nerves had warmed up to the point that now I merely felt as if all four of my limbs had fallen asleep at the same time.

“Do you want to . . . take a look around?” asked the zombie who’d found me. Now that the earthquake had stopped, everyone in the graveyard was milling around uncertainly.

“No,” I said, folding my arms with a series of unpleasant cracking noises. “I’m not moving until someone or something comes along and explains what the hell’s going on. And only if it’s a good explanation with lots of apologies.”

Suddenly there was a thunderclap of magical energies colliding and a vertical sheet of flame burst forth along the ground several feet away, walling off access. More firewalls started igniting, forming a zigzag that seemed to be bearing down on us.

That’ll have to do, I thought. Somehow I’d leapt to my feet, and I found myself forced to run again. More flaming barriers were bursting up all over the cemetery, and the undead masses were soon high-speed shuffling away from them and towards the graveyard entrance, where a crowd was frantically shoving against a pair of massive iron gates. A few attempted to scatter in different directions and were turned away by pointed bursts of flame. The word “shepherding” came to mind.

“What’s going on?!” I said, repeating myself somewhat.

“It is a sign for the righteous,” said someone next to me, who was gazing at a point above and to the left of him. “We have been resurrected for the Day of Judgment.”

Too late I noticed his suspiciously cassock-like robe and collar. Mages, even student ones, don’t get along with priests. Priests are all about using magic to heal wounds, and mages are all about using magic to create the wounds in the first place. Still, religion was probably the best place to start looking for an explanation, since there was a definite apocalyptic taste to current events. “Day of Judgment?”

He looked down at me in that way priests do, with what remained of his lips smashed tightly together and his eyes staring like I’d just widdled on his daughter. “The LORD has returned the righteous to life in time for the Rapture.”

I looked around for my cryptmates, but they had been absorbed by the crowd, and once they reach a certain stage of decomposition, all corpses start to look alike. “Er,” I said, glancing toward the spooky and unhelpful forest. “Does Almighty God say anything about the itinerary for Judgment Day? I mean, are we supposed to meet him somewhere?”

Almost all the resurrected were now gathered around the entrance gates. A couple of forward-thinking undead were rattling the padlock with numb fingers, but they jumped back in terror when a colossal explosion rang out. As one, the crystals disintegrated, filling the air with tiny shards of twinkling green glass. A fork of lightning split the night sky, a boom like the crashing of worlds. The wind picked up, fluttering our rotting rags insanely about our bodies. Something was obviously trying to get our attention.

“This is it,” said the priest. “I am returning to my father!” He kicked me in the leg. “Stand not so close to me, demon, and stain not my soul!”

“Ow.”

A laugh screamed out over the graveyard, a hearty and insane laugh, about as far removed from polite after dinner laughter as you can get. This was the kind of insane laughter even the truly insane have to practice for years to get right.

There, standing on top of the gate with legs wide, one fist pointed skyways and one clinging to a nearby pillar for stability, was a cackling silhouette. A bolt of lightning set alight a circle of fuel, obviously prepared beforehand, and a fire quickly rose around his perch.

“Rise, my hordes of darkness!” he shrieked, then he did that laugh thing again. With the firelight, I could now make out his features. He was very tall and very thin, with the body and skin tone of one who has placed far too many pieces of his soul in far too many evil magic artifacts. He had tried to disguise his skinny build with a thickly padded black cloak and a pair of spiked shoulder pads the size of watermelons. Framing his sunken face was an ornate obsidian helmet carved somewhat predictably into the shape of an angry fanged skull. In addition to all that, he was addressing a bunch of dead guys, so he might as well have been wearing a sash with “NECROMANCER” writ big.

“Rise!” he repeated, throwing up his hands. “Rise, and join the ranks of my unholy horde!”

He seemed to notice for the first time that we weren’t exactly rushing to his side, but were mainly watching him as a zoo patron would watch a crazy monkey, curious but ready to move at the first sign of poo-flinging. There was a minute of awkward silence before someone near the back with their head held under their arm said, “Who’s this twat?”

“Are you God?” asked someone else.

The necromancer clearly wasn’t prepared for either of those questions, but to his credit he recovered quickly. “Perhaps I am!” he said, flashing a winning smile. “Your ruler, certainly! And soon the ruler of the world!” He stretched out the word “world” until a roll of thunder served up the exclamation mark. “March, my undead minions! We ride to my fortress of darkness!”

Glances were exchanged between the undead minions in question, most of them directed towards the agnostic speaker of the previous question, who was apparently being groomed as company spokesman. He was a turquoise fellow with missing ears and piles of gravedirt on his shoulders. “Do we have to?”

This time, the necromancer’s improvisational skills abandoned him. His arms dropped to his sides, and when he replied, the booming insane qualities were missing from his voice. “Well . . . yes, I mean . . . you’re my undead minions. I raised you from the grave. You have to do everything I say.” Doubt was clearly nagging at him. He extended his hands again, holding his gnarled ebony staff horizontally. “I command thee to march!”

“Your commands are the futile bleating of the damned, bedfellow of the Serpent,” growled the priest.

“March!” A spark of panic materialized in the necromancer’s eyes as if it had finally dawned on him that he had just placed himself right in the middle of a cranky, unstoppable army of unwilling zombies and identified himself as the source of their misfortune. “March! Walk . . . jump up and down . . .
do a little dance . . . er . . . ” The staff wobbled nervously in his grip. “You’ve got free will, haven’t you.”

“Sort of,” said the spokesman.

“They’ve got free will!” called the necromancer, to a trio of men in full suits of spikey black armor who had been tending to a quartet of horses some distance away. “How the hell have they got free will?!”

“I dunno what to tell yer, Lord Dreadgrave,” said one of the soldiers, his voice echoing nicely in his senselessly huge helmet. “It’s your ritual.”

Dreadgrave smacked himself in the face with a full open palm. “It’s my ritual. It’s meh reh teh meh. It’s meh meh meh meh. I came in here for a horde. What the hell am I supposed to do with a bunch of smelly . . . independents?”

“Why don’t you just ask us to join your horde?” said the haughty lady with no arms. “Like polite, decent people do.”

“Would you really? If I asked? Gartharas, would you put this fire out, please, I think it’s coming straight for my shoes—”

“Maybe,” said our spokesman, as the armored men began stamping on the dwindling ring of flame. “I mean, we’ve never really been in any undead hordes before, so we might be interested in the opportunity to try new things.”

“And it’s not like we’ve got much else to do with our time now that we’re piles of rotting meat and bones that no-one besides the utterly depraved would ever want to sleep with,” said the decrepit old corpse (whom I still felt had issues).

Dreadgrave tapped his staff against his palm pensively. “Do you want to join my horde?”

The undead closest to the spokesman, and the ones who had appointed themselves senior members of the undead community, went into a huddled conference. For a few minutes, all eyes were on a muttering scrumdown of assorted abominations. Someone put forward a motion, someone else seconded it, and the meeting was adjourned. “What does it pay?” asked the spokesman, after a cough.

“Pay?” said Dreadgrave distastefully. “Why should it pay anything?”

A collective moan descended on the crowd, and some of them started drifting away, losing interest in the whole stupid affair.

“But . . . wait, wait, wait, don’t go, don’t go, don’t go,” said the necromancer, flapping his arms to avoid losing his audience. “What I meant was . . . why do you want to get paid? What could you possibly want the money for?” No-arms opened her mouth to reply, but no answer was forthcoming. Dreadgrave continued. “You don’t need food. You don’t need water. You don’t need to sleep, so you don’t need shelter, so you don’t need rent money. You can’t get tired so you don’t need to pay for carriages and things. What else is there?”

“Prostitutes?” tried Gartharas, leaning amicably on a tombstone.

“Well, like he said, they’d need to be blind or open-minded to a completely shameful degree. I just don’t think any of you could have any possible need for a regular wage.”

“Just because we don’t need it doesn’t mean we couldn’t find a use for it,” said our spokesman. “We could donate it to charity. Arrange trust funds for our surviving loved ones. Take up antique collecting. Go to the opera.”

“They wouldn’t let you in at the opera—”

“Well, that was just an example, wasn’t it? We could go to a pantomime or some low-budget musical production or something. The point is, you can’t expect to hire an army without incentive; if everyone could do, that the whole economy would collapse.”

People were starting to drift off again, as they do when words like “economy” enter the conversation, so Dreadgrave was spurred to interrupt. “Okay, listen, listen. What would you say to . . . a profit sharing scheme?”

The drifting stopped. The crowd cocked a collective ear.

“Join my horde, and every time we fall upon a town or village, you get to keep everything you loot, minus a small percentage—no! Wait! Come back! No deductions, no deductions! Maybe a small deduc—okay, none at all! All yours! And free room and board at my doom fortress.”

There was a lot of conferring going on among the shambling dead. I waited to see their decision; I’d been in enough angry mobs in my time to know that the smart money was always with the majority.

“And every month, I’ll take you all to see a low-budget musical production.”

A lot of heads were nodding approvingly now. The spokesman counted a show of hands, then relayed the result. “Done.”

“Then march, my undead horde!” screamed Dreadgrave, holding his arms aloft and getting back into the swing of things. “We ride to my fortress of darkness!”

1

"Coercive as coma, frail as bloom
innuendoes of your inverse dawn
suffuse the self;
our every corpuscle become an elf."
—MINA LOY, "Moreover, the Moon," The Lost Lunar Baedeker

Kaye spun down the worn, gray planks of the boardwalk. The air was heavy and stank of drying mussels and the crust of salt on the jetties. Waves tossed themselves against the shore, dragging grit and sand between their nails as they were slowly pulled back out to sea.

The moon was high and pale in the sky, but the sun was just going down.

It was so good to be able to breathe, Kaye thought. She loved the serene brutality of the ocean, loved the electric power she felt with each breath of wet, briny air. She spun again, dizzily, not caring that her skirt was flying up over the tops of her black thigh-high stockings.

"Come on," Janet called. She stepped over the overflowing, leaf-choked gutter along the street parallel to the boardwalk, wobbling slightly on fat-heeled platform shoes. Her glitter makeup sparkled under the street lamps. Janet exhaled ghosts of blue smoke and took another drag on her cigarette. "You're going to fall."

Kaye and her mother had been staying at her grandmother's a week already, and even though Ellen kept saying they'd be leaving soon, Kaye knew they really had nowhere to go. Kaye was glad. She loved the big old house caked with dust and mothballs. She liked the sea being so close and the air not stinging in her throat.

The cheap hotels they passed were long closed and boarded up, their pools drained and cracked. Even the arcades were shut down, prizes in the claw machines still visible through the cloudy glass windows. Rust marks above an abandoned storefront outlined the words SALT WATER TAFFY.

Janet dug through her tiny purse and pulled out a wand of strawberry lipgloss. Kaye spun up to her, fake leopard coat flying open, a run already in her stocking. Her boots had sand stuck to them.

"Let's go swimming," Kaye said. She was giddy with night air, burning like the white-hot moon. Everything smelled wet and feral like it did before a thunderstorm, and she wanted to run, swift and eager, beyond the edge of what she could see.

"The water's freezing," Janet said, sighing, "and your hair is fucked up. Kaye, when we get there, you have to be cool. Don't seem so weird. Guys don't like weird."

Kaye paused and seemed to be listening intently, her upturned, kohl-rimmed eyes watching Janet as warily as a cat's. "What should I be like?"

"It's not that I want you to be a certain way—don't you want a boyfriend?"

"Why bother with that? Let's find incubi."

"Incubi?"

"Demons. Plural. Like octopi. And we're much more likely to find them"—her voice dropped conspiratorially—"while swimming naked in the Atlantic a week before Halloween than practically anywhere else I can think of."

Janet rolled her eyes.

"You know what the sun looks like?" Kaye asked. There was only a little more than a slice of red where the sea met the sky.

"No, what?" Janet said, holding the lipgloss out to Kaye.

"Like he slit his wrists in a bathtub and the blood is all over the water."

"That's gross, Kaye."

"And the moon is just watching. She's just watching him die. She must have driven him to it."

"Kaye..."

Kaye spun again, laughing.

"Why are you always making shit up? That's what I mean by weird." Janet was speaking loudly, but Kaye could barely hear her over the wind and the sound of her own laughter.

"C'mon, Kaye. Remember the faeries you used to tell stories about? What was his name?"

"Which one? Spike or Gristle?"

"Exactly. You made them up!" Janet said. "You always make things up."

Kaye stopped spinning, cocking her head to one side, fingers sliding into her pockets. "I didn't say I didn't."

—

The old merry-go-round building had been semi-abandoned for years. Angelic lead faces, surrounded by rays of hair, divided the broken panes. The entire front of it was windowed, revealing the dirt floor, glass glittering against the refuse. Inside, a crude plywood skateboarding ramp was the only remains of an attempt to use the building commercially in the last decade.

Kaye could hear voices echoing in the still air all the way out to the street. Janet dropped her cigarette into the gutter. It hissed and was quickly carried away, sitting on the water like a spider.

Kaye hoisted herself up onto the outside ledge and swung her legs over. The window had been long gone, but her leg scraped against the residue as she slid in, fraying her stockings further.

Layers of paint thickly covered the once-intricate moldings inside the carousel building. The ramp in the center of the room was tagged by local spray-paint artists and covered with band stickers and ballpoint pen scrawlings. And there were the boys.

"Kaye Fierch, you remember me, right?" Doughboy chuckled. He was short and thin, despite his name.

"I think you threw a bottle at my head in sixth grade."

He laughed again. "Right. Right. I forgot that. You're not still mad?"

"No," she said, but her blithe mood was gone, leaving her drained and anxious. Janet climbed on top of the skateboard ramp to where Kenny was sitting, a king in his silver flight jacket, watching the proceedings. Handsome, with dark hair and darker eyes. He held up a nearly full bottle of tequila in greeting.

Marcus handed Kaye the bottle he was drinking from, making a mock throwing motion as he did so. A little splashed on the sleeve of his flannel shirt. "Bourbon. Expensive shit."

She forced a smile as she took it. Marcus resumed gutting a cigar. Even hunched over, he was a big guy. The brown skin on his head gleamed, and she could see where he must have nicked himself shaving it.

"I brought you some candy," Janet said to Kenny. She had candy corn and peanut chews.

"I brought you some candy," Doughboy mocked in a high, squeaky voice, jumping up on the ramp. "Give it here," he said.

Kaye walked around the round room. It was magnificent, old and decayed and fine. The slow burn of bourbon in her throat was perfect for this place, the sort of thing a man in a summer suit who always wore a hat might drink.

"What flavor of Asian are you?" Marcus asked. He had filled the cigar with weed and was chomping down on one end. The thick, sweet smell almost choked her.

She took another swallow from the bottle and tried to ignore him.

"Kaye! You hear me?"

"I'm half Japanese." Kaye touched her hair, blond as her mother's. It was the hair that baffled people.

"Man, you ever see the cartoons there? They have them little, little girls with these pigtails and shit in these short school uniforms. We should have uniforms like that here, man. You ever wear one of those, huh?"

"Shut up, dickhead," Janet said, laughing. "She went to grade school with Doughboy and me."

Kenny looped one finger through the belt rings of Janet's jeans and pulled her over to kiss her.

"Yeah, well, damn." Marcus laughed. "Won't you hold up your hair in those pigtails for a second or something? Come on."

Kaye shook her head. No, she wouldn't.

Marcus and Doughboy started to play Hacky Sack with an empty beer bottle. It didn't break as they kicked it boot to boot, but it made a hollow sound. She took another long sip of bourbon. Her head was already buzzing pleasantly, humming in time with imagined merry-go-round music. She moved farther back into the dim room, to where old placards announced popcorn and peanuts for five cents apiece.

Against the far wall was a black, weathered door. It opened jerkily when she pushed it. Moonlight from the windows in the main room revealed only an office with an old desk and a corkboard with yellowed menus still pinned to it. She stepped inside, even though the light switch didn't work. Feeling in the blackness, she found a knob. This door led to a stairwell with only a little light drifting down from the top. She felt her way up the stairs. Dust covered the palms of her hands as she slid them along the railings. She sneezed loudly, then sneezed again.

At the top was a small window lit brightly by the murderess moon, ripe and huge in the sky. Interesting boxes were stacked in the corners. Then her eyes fell on the horse, and she forgot all the rest. He was magnificent—gleaming pearl white and covered with tiny pieces of glued-down mirror. His face was painted with red and purple and gold, and he even had a bar of white teeth and a painted pink tongue with enough space to tuck a sugar cube. It was obvious why he'd been left behind—his legs on all four sides and part of his tail had been shattered. Splinters hung down from where his legs used to be.

Gristle would have loved this. She had thought that many times since she had left the Shore, six years past. My imaginary friends would have loved this. She'd thought it the first time that she'd seen the city, lit up like never-ending Christmas. But they never came when she was in Philadelphia. And now she was sixteen and felt like she had no imagination left.

She tried to set the horse up as if he were standing on his ruined stumps. It wobbled unsteadily but didn't fall. Kaye pulled off her coat and dropped it on the dusty floor, setting the bourbon next to it. She swung one leg over the beast and dropped onto its saddle, using her feet to keep it from falling. She ran her hands down its mane, which was carved in golden ringlets. She touched the painted black eyes and the chipped ears.

The white horse rose on unsteady legs in her mind. The long curls of the gold mane were cool in her hands, and the great bulk of the animal was real and warm beneath her. She wove her hands in the mane and gripped hard, slightly aware of a prickling feeling all through her limbs. The horse whinnied softly beneath her, ready to leap out into the cold, black water. She threw back her head.

"Kaye?" A soft voice snapped her out of her daydream. Kenny was standing near the stairs, regarding her blankly. For a moment, though, she was still fierce. Then she felt her cheeks burning.

Caught in the half-light, she could see him better than she had downstairs. Two heavy silver hoops shone in the lobes of his ears. His short, cinnamon hair was mussed and had a slight wave to it, matching the beginnings of a goatee on his chin. Under the flight jacket, his too-tight white T-shirt showed the easy muscles of someone who was born with them.

He moved toward her, reaching his hand out and then looking at it oddly, as though he didn't remember deciding to do that. Instead he petted the head of the horse, slowly, almost hypnotically.

"I saw you," he said. "I saw what you did."

"Where's Janet?" Kaye wasn't sure what he meant. She would have thought he was teasing her except for his serious face, his slow way of speaking.

He was stroking the animal's mane now. "She was worried about you." His hand fascinated her despite herself. It seemed like he was tangling it in imaginary hair. "How did you make it do that?"

"Do what?" She was afraid now, afraid and flattered both. There was no mocking or teasing in his face. He was watching her so intensely that he seemed drained of expression.

"I saw it stand up." His voice was so low she could almost pretend that she didn't hear him right. His hand dropped to her thigh and slid upward to the cotton crotch of her panties.

Even though she had seen the slow progression of his hand, the touch startled her. She was paralyzed for a moment before she sprang up, letting the horse fall as she did. It crashed down, knocking the bottle of bourbon over, dark liquor pouring over her coat and soaking the bottoms of the dusty boxes like the tide coming in at night.

He grabbed for her before she could think, his hand catching hold of the neck of her shirt. She stepped back, off-balance, and fell, her shirt ripping open over her bra even as he let go of it.

Shoes pounded up the stairs.

"What the fuck?" Marcus was at the top of the stairwell with Doughboy, trying to shove his way in for a look.

Kenny shook his head and looked around numbly while Kaye scrambled for her bourbon-soaked coat.

The boys moved out of the way, and Janet was there, too, staring.

"What happened?" Janet asked, looking between them in confusion. Kaye pushed past her, shoving her hand through an armhole of the coat as she threw it over her back.

"Kaye!" Janet called after her.

Kaye ignored her, taking the stairs two at a time in the dark. There was nothing she could say that would explain what had happened.

She could hear Janet shouting. "What did you do to her? What the fuck did you do?"

Kaye ran across the carousel hall and swung her leg over the sill. The glass she had carefully avoided earlier slashed a thin line on the outside of her thigh as she dropped among the sandy soil and weeds.

The cold wind felt good against her hot face.

-

Cornelius Stone picked up the new box of computer crap and hauled it into his bedroom to drop next to the others. Each time his mother came home from the flea market with a cracked monitor, sticky keyboard, or just loads of wires, she had that hopeful look that made Corny want to hit her. She just couldn't comprehend the difference between a 286 and a quantum computer. She couldn't understand that the age of guerilla engineering was at a close, that being a motherfucking genius wasn't enough. You needed to be a rich motherfucking genius.

He dropped the box, kicked it hard three times, picked up his denim jacket with the devil's head on the back, and made for the door.

"Can you use that stuff, honey?" His mother was in Janet's room, folding a new pair of secondhand jeans. She held up a T-shirt with rhinestone cats on it. "Think your sister will like it?"

"Thanks, Ma," he said through gritted teeth. "I got to get to work." He walked past The Husband, who was stooped over, getting a beer from the case under the kitchen table. The white cat was waddling along the countertop, its belly dragging with another pregnancy, screaming for canned food or pickles and ice cream or something. He petted its head grudgingly, but before it began rubbing against his hand in earnest, he opened the screen door and went out into the lot.

The cool October air was a relief from the recirculated cigarette smoke.

Corny loved his car. It was a primer-colored Chevy blooming with rust spots and an inner lining that hung like baggy skin from the roof. He knew what he looked like. Beaky. Skinny and tall with bad hair and worse skin. He lived up to his name. Cornelius. Corny. Corn-dog. But not in his car. Inside, he was anonymous.

Every day for the last three weeks he had left a little earlier for work. He would go to the convenience store and buy some food. Then he would drive around, cruise past all the local rutting joints, imagining he had a semiautomatic rifle in the car and counting how many he could have gotten. "Pow," he'd say, softly, to rolled-up windows as a brown-haired boy with broad shoulders and a backwards baseball cap ran up to the giggling girls behind the window of a red truck. "Pow. Pow."

Tonight, he bought a cup of coffee and a package of black licorice. He lingered over a paperback with an embossed metallic dragon on the cover, reading the first few sentences, hoping something would interest him. The game was becoming boring. Worse than boring, it made him feel more pathetic than before. Nearly a week before Halloween and all, this was the point when a real maniac would go and get a gun. He sipped at the coffee and almost spat it out. Too sweet. He sipped at it some more, steeling himself to the taste. Disgusting.

Corny got out of his car and chucked the full coffee into the parking lot. It splashed satisfactorily on the asphalt. He went inside and poured himself another cup. From behind the counter, a matronly woman with frizzy red hair looked him over and pointed to his jacket. "Who are you supposed to be, the devil?"

"I wish," Corny said, dropping a dollar twenty-five on the counter. "I wish."

PART I:
BEGINNINGS

Chapter 1

The first time was like this.

I was reading when Dad got home. His voice echoed through the house and I cringed.

“Davy!”

I put the book down and sat up on the bed. “In here, Dad. I’m in my room.”

His footsteps on the hallway’s oak floor got louder and louder. I felt my head hunching between my shoulders; then Dad was at the door and raging.

“I thought I told you to mow the lawn today!” He came into the room and towered over me. “Well! Speak up when I ask you a question!”

“I’m gonna do it, Dad. I was just finishing a book.”

“You’ve been home from school for over two hours! I’m sick and tired of you lying around this house doing nothing!” He leaned close and the whiskey on his breath made my eyes water. I flinched back and he grabbed the back of my neck with fingers like a vise. He shook me. “You’re nothing but a lazy brat. I’m going to beat some industry into you if I have to kill you to do it!”

He pulled me to my feet, still gripping my neck. With his other hand he fumbled for the ornate rodeo buckle on his belt, then snaked the heavy Western strap out of his pants loops.

“No, Dad. I’ll mow the lawn right now. Honest!”

“Shut up,” he said. He pushed me into the wall. I barely got my hands up in time to keep my face from slamming nose-first into the plaster. He switched hands then, pressing me against the wall with his left while he took the belt in his right hand.

I twisted my head slightly, to keep my nose from grinding into the wall, and saw him switch his grip on the belt, so the heavy silver buckle hung on the end, away from his hand.

I yelled. “Not the buckle, Dad! You promised!”

He ground my face into the wall harder. “Shut UP! I didn’t hit you near hard enough the last time.” He extended his arm until he held me against the wall at arm’s length and swung the belt back slowly. Then his arm jerked forward and the belt sung though the air and my body betrayed me, squirming away from the impact and...

I was leaning against bookshelves, my neck free of Dad’s crushing grip, my body still braced to receive a blow. I looked around, gasping, my heart still racing. There was no sign of Dad, but this didn’t surprise me.

I was in the fiction section of the Stanville Public Library and, while I knew it as well as my own room, I didn’t think my father had ever been inside the building.

That was the first time.

The second time was like this.

The truck stop was new and busy, an island of glaring light and hard concrete in the night. I went in the glass doors to the restaurant and took a chair at the counter, near the section with the sign that said, DRIVERS ONLY. The clock on the wall read eleven-thirty. I put the rolled-up bundle of stuff on the floor under my feet and tried to look old.

The middle-aged waitress on the other side of the counter looked skeptical, but she put down a menu and a glass of water, then said, “Coffee?”

“Hot tea, please.”

She smiled mechanically and left.

The drivers’ section was half full, a thick haze of tobacco smoke over it. None of them looked like the kind of man who’d give me the time of day, much less a lift farther down the road.

The waitress returned with a cup, a tea bag, and one of those little metal pitchers filled with not very hot water. “What can I get you?” she asked.

“I’ll stick with this for a while.”

She looked at me steadily for a moment, then totaled the check and laid on the counter. “Cashier will take it when you’re ready. You want anything else, just let me know.”

I didn’t know to hold the lid open as I poured the water, so a third of it ended up on the counter. I mopped it up with napkins from the dispenser and tried not to cry.

“Been on the road long, kid?”

I jerked my head up. A man, sitting in the last seat of the drivers’ section, was looking at me. He was big, both tall and fat, with a roll of skin where his shirt neck opened. He was smiling and I could see his teeth were uneven and stained.

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “Your business. You don’t look like you’ve been running long.” His voice was higher-pitched than you’d expect for a man his size, but kind.

I looked past him, at the door. “About two weeks.”

He nodded. “Rough. You running from your parents?”

“My dad. My mom cut out long ago.”

He pushed his spoon around the countertop with his finger. The nails were long with grease crusted under them. “How old are you, kid?”

“Seventeen.”

He looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t care what you think. It’s true. I turned seventeen lousy years old yesterday.” The tears started to come and I blinked hard, got them back under control.

“What you been doing since you left home?”

The tea had gotten as dark as it was going to. I pulled the tea bag and spooned sugar into the cup. “I’ve been hitching, panhandling a little, some odd jobs. Last two days I picked apples—twenty-five cents a bushel and all I could eat. I also got some clothes out of it.”

“Two weeks and you’re out of your own clothes already?”

I gulped down half the tea. “I only took what I was wearing.” All I was wearing when I walked out of the Stanville Public Library.

“Oh. Well, my name’s Topper. Topper Robbins. What’s yours?”

I stared at him. “Davy,” I said, finally.

“Davy...?”

“Just Davy.”

He smiled again. “I understand. Don’t have to beat me about the head and shoulders.” He picked up his spoon and stirred his coffee. “Well, Davy, I’m driving that PetroChem tanker out there and I’m headed west in about forty-five minutes. If you’re going that way, I’ll be glad to give you a ride. You look like you could use some food, though. Why don’t you let me buy you a meal?”

The tears came again then. I was ready for cruelty but not kindness. I blinked hard and said, “Okay. I’d appreciate the meal and the ride.”

An hour later I was westbound in the right-hand seat of Topper’s rig, drowsing from the heat of the cab and the full stomach. I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep, tired of talking. Topper tried to talk a little more after that, but stopped. I watched him out of narrowed eyes. He kept turning his head to look at me when the headlights from oncoming traffic lit the cab’s interior. I thought I should feel grateful, but he gave me the creeps.

After a while I fell asleep for real. I came awake with a start, unsure of where I was or even who. There was a tremor running through my mind, a reaction to a bad dream, barely remembered. I narrowed my eyes again and my identity and associated memories came back.

Topper was talking on the CB.

“I’ll meet you behind Sam’s,” he was saying. “Fifteen minutes.”

“Ten-four, Topper. We’re on our way.”

Topper signed off.

I yawned and sat up. “Jeeze. Did I sleep long?”

“About an hour, Davy.” He smiled like there’d been a joke. He turned off his CB then and turned the radio to a country and western station.

I hate country and western.

Ten minutes later he took an exit for a farm road far from anywhere.

“You can let me out here, Topper.”

“I’m going on kid, just have to meet a guy first. You don’t want to hitch in the dark. Nobody’ll stop. Besides, it looks like rain.”

He was right. The moon had vanished behind a thick overcast and the wind was whipping the trees around.

“Okay.”

He drove down the rural two-lane for a while, then pulled off the road at a country store with two gas pumps out front. The store was dark but there was a gravel lot out back where two pickups were parked. Topper pulled the rig up beside them.

“Come on, kid. Want you to meet some guys.”

I didn’t move. “That’s okay. I’ll wait for you here.”

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s against company policy to pick up riders, but my ass would really be grass if I left you in here and something happened. Be a sport.”

I nodded slowly. “Sure. Don’t mean to be any trouble.”

He grinned again, big. “No trouble.”

I shivered.

To climb down, I had to turn and face the cab, then feel with my feet for the step. A hand guided my foot to the step and I froze. I looked down. Three men were standing on my side of the truck. I could hear gravel crunching as Topper walked around the front of the rig. I looked at him. He was unbuckling his jeans and pulling down his zipper.

I yelled and scrambled back up to the cab, but strong hands gripped my ankles and knees, dragging me back down. I grabbed onto the chrome handle by the door with both hands as tight as I could, flailing my legs to try and break their grip. Somebody punched me in the stomach hard and I let go of the handle, the air in my lungs, and my supper all at once.

“Jesus fucking Christ. He puked all over me!” Somebody hit me again as I fell.

They grabbed my arms and carried me over to the open tailgate of a pickup. They slammed me down on the bed of the truck. My face hit and I tasted blood. One of them jumped up on the truck bed and straddled my back, his knees and shins pinning my upper arms, one hand gripping my hair painfully. I felt somebody else reach around and unbuckle my belt, then rip my pants and underwear down. The air was cold on my butt and upper legs.

A voice said, “I wish you’d gotten another girl.”

Another voice said, “Who brought the Vaseline?”

“Shit. It’s in the truck.”

“Well... we don’t need it.”

Somebody reached between my legs and pawed my genitals; then I felt him spread the cheeks of my butt and spit. His warm saliva splattered my bottom and...

I pitched forward, the pressure off my arms and hair, the hands off my bottom. My head banged into something and I struck out to hit my hand against something which gave. I turned, clutched at my pants, pulled them up from my knees, while I sobbed for air, my heart pounding and my entire body shaking.

It was dark, but the air was still and I was alone. I wasn’t outside anymore. A patch of moonlight came through a window six feet away to shine on bookshelves. I tasted blood again, gingerly touched my split upper lip. I walked carefully down to the patch of light and looked around.

I pulled a book from the shelf and opened it. The stamp on the inside cover told me what I already knew. I was back in the fiction section of the Stanville Public Library and I was sure I’d gone mad.

That was the second time.

The first time I ended up in the library, it was open, I wasn’t bleeding, my clothes were clean, and I just walked away... from that building, from that town, from that life.

I thought I’d pulled a blank. I thought that whatever my father did to me was so terrible that I’d simply chosen not to remember it. That I’d only come back to myself after reaching the safety of the library.

The thought of pulling a blank was scary, but it wasn’t strange to me. Dad pulled blanks all the time and I’d read enough fiction to be familiar with trauma-induced amnesia.

I was surprised that the library was closed and dark this time. I checked the wall clock. It read two o’clock, an hour and five minutes later than the digital clock in Topper’s truck. Jesus Christ. I shivered in the library’s air-conditioning and fumbled at my pants. The zipper was broken but the snap worked. I buckled the belt an extra notch tight, then pulled my shirt out so it hung over the zipper. My mouth tasted of blood and vomit.

The library was lit from without by pale white moonlight and the yellow glare of mercury streetlamps. I threaded my way between shelves, chairs, tables to the water fountain and rinsed my mouth again and again until the taste was gone from my mouth and the bleeding of my lip had stopped.

In two weeks I’d worked my way over nine hundred miles from my father. In one heartbeat I’d undone that, putting myself fifteen minutes away from the house. I sat down on a hard wooden chair and put my head in my hands. What had I done to deserve this?

There was something I wasn’t dealing with. I knew it. Something...

I’m so tired. All I want is to rest. I thought of all the snatches of sleep I’d had over the last two weeks, miserable stolen moments on rest-stop benches, in people’s cars, and under bushes like some animal. I thought of the house, fifteen minutes away, of my bedroom, of my bed.

A wave of irresistible longing came over me and I found myself standing and walking, without thought, just desire for that bed. I went to the emergency exit at the back, the one with the ALARM WILL SOUND sign. I figured by the time any alarm was answered, I could be well away.

It was chained. I leaned against it and hit it very hard, an overhand blow with the flat of my hand. I drew back, tears in my eyes, to hit it again but it wasn’t there and I pitched forward, off balance and flailing, into my bed.

I knew it was my bed. I think it was the smell of the room that told me first, but the backlit alarm-clock face on the bedside table was the one Mom sent the year after she left and the light from the back porch light streamed through the window at just the right angle.

For one brief moment I relaxed, utterly and completely, muscle after muscle unknotting. I closed my eyes and felt exhaustion steal over me in a palpable wave. Then I heard a noise and I jerked up, rigid, on the bedspread on my hands and knees. The sound came again. Dad... snoring.

I shuddered. It was strange. It was a very comforting sound. It was home, it was family. It also meant the son of a bitch was asleep.

I took off my shoes and padded down the hall. The door was half open and the overhead light was on. He was sprawled diagonally across the bed, on top of the covers, both shoes and one sock off, his shirt unbuttoned. There was an empty bottle of scotch tucked in the crook of his arm. I sighed.

Home sweet home.

I grabbed the bottle neck and pulled it gently from between his arm and his side, then set it on the bedside table. He snored on, oblivious. I took his pants off then, pulling the legs alternately to work them past his butt. They came free abruptly and his wallet fell from the back pocket. I hung the pants over the back of a chair, then went through the wallet.

He had eighty bucks plus his plastic. I took three twenties, then started to put it on the dresser, but stopped. When I folded the wallet, it seemed stiffer than it should, and thicker. I looked closer. There was a hidden compartment covered by a flap with fake stitching. I got it open and nearly dropped the wallet. It was full of hundred-dollar bills.

I turned the light off and carried the wallet back to my room, where I counted twenty-two crisp hundred-dollar bills onto the bed.

I stared down at the money, four rows of five, one row of two, my eyes wide. My ears were burning and my stomach suddenly hurt. I went back to Dad’s room and stared at him for a while.

This was the man who took me to the mission and the secondhand stores to buy clothes for school. This was the man who made me take peanut butter and jelly to school every day rather than part with a crummy ninety cents’ worth of lunch money. This was the man who beat me when I’d suggested an allowance for doing the yard work.

I picked up the empty scotch bottle and hefted it, shifted my grip to the neck. It was cold, smooth, and just the right size for my small hands. The glass didn’t slip or shift as I swung it experimentally. The glass at the base of the bottle was extra thick where the manufacturer had chosen to give the impression of a bigger bottle. It looked very strong.

Dad snored away, his mouth open, his face slack. His skin, pale normally, looked white as paper in the overhead light. His forehead, receding, domed, lined, looked egglike, white, fragile. I felt the base of the bottle with my left hand. It felt more than heavy enough.

Shit.

I put the bottle back down on the table, turned off the light, and went back to my room.

I took notebook paper, cut it dollar-bill-size, and stacked it until it felt as thick as the pile of hundreds. It took twenty sheets to match the stiffness of the money—maybe it was thicker or just newer. I put the cut paper in the wallet and put it back in the pocket of his slacks.

Then I went to the garage and took down the old leather suitcase, the one Granddad gave me when he retired, and packed it with my clothes, toiletries, and the leather-bound set of Mark Twain that Mom left me.

After I’d closed the suitcase, stripped off my dirty clothes, and put on my suit, I just stood looking around the room, swaying on my feet. If I didn’t start moving soon, I’d drop.

There was something else, something I could use....

I thought of the kitchen, only thirty feet away, down the hall and across the den. Before Mom left, I’d loved to sit in there while she cooked, just talking, telling her stupid jokes. I closed my eyes and pictured it, tried to feel it.

The air around me changed, or maybe it was just the noise. I was in a quiet house, but just the sound of my breathing reflecting off walls sounded different from room to room.

I was in the kitchen.

I nodded my head slowly, tiredly. Hysteria seethed beneath the surface, a rising bubble that threatened to undo me. I pushed it down and looked in the refrigerator.

Three six-packs of Schlitz, two cartons of cigarettes, half a pizza in the cardboard delivery box. I shut the door and thought about my room. I tried it with my eyes open, unfocused, picturing the spot between my desk and the window.

I was there and the room reeled, my eyes and maybe my inner ear just not ready for the change. I put my hand on the wall and the room stopped moving.

I picked up the suitcase and closed my eyes. I opened them in the library, dark shadows alternating with silver pools of moonlight. I walked to the front door and looked out at the grass.

Last summer, before school, I’d come up to the library, check out a book or two, and then move outside, to the grass under the elms. The wind would ruffle the pages, tug my hair and clothes around, and I would go into the words, find the cracks between the sentences and the words would go away, leaving me in the story, the action, the head of other people. Twice I left it too late and got home after Dad did. He liked supper ready. Only twice, though. Twice was more than enough.

I closed my eyes and the wind pushed my hair and fluttered my tie. The suitcase was heavy and I had to switch hands several times as I walked the two blocks to the bus station.

There was a bus for points east at 5:30 A.M. I bought a ticket to New York City for one hundred and twenty-two dollars and fifty-three cents. The clerk took the two hundreds without comment, gave me my change, and said I had three hours to wait.

They were the longest three hours I’ve ever spent. Every fifteen minutes I got up, dragged the suitcase to the bathroom, and splashed cold water in my face. Near the end of the wait the furniture was crawling across the floor, and every movement of the bushes outside the doors was my father, belt in hand, the buckle razor-edged and about the size of a hubcap.

The bus was five minutes late. The driver stowed my suitcase below, took the first part of my ticket, and ushered me aboard.

When we passed the tattered city-limits sign, I closed my eyes and slept for six hours.

what a long strange trip it's been

Ryan and Nolan are my wife Anne's sons from a previous marriage. They were 6 and 4 when I entered their lives, and I've raised them as my own ever since. I've always called them my stepsons out of respect for their relationship with their biological father, but I've never made an emotional distinction; they are my sons in every way that matters.

I adore them, and as their primary father figure, I've worked very hard to pass along my core values of honesty, integrity, hard work and compassion to them. Over the years, I've also shared (intentionally and not) the things that make me a geek, like my love of science, comic books, science fiction, and math. This is just one example of an all-too frequent occurrence in our house.

I asked my stepson Ryan what the formula was to find the circumference of a circle if you know its diameter.

"It's C = π × D," he said.

"Thanks," I said. "I can't believe I forgot that."

I grabbed my calculator and entered 3.14 × 186,000,000.

"Why didn't you remember that formula?" he asked.

"Because that part of my brain doesn't get used as frequently as it once did, and even when it got used almost every day, I had a…difficult…relationship with it."

584,040,000 came up on my display.

"Why did you want to know what it was?" he asked.

"I just had this idea, and I wanted to know something…"

I typed in 584,040,000 × 34 and got back 19,857,360,000.

I looked up at him, unable to contain the huge smile that spread across my face.

"I've been riding this planet for almost twenty billion miles," I said.

"Whoa," he said. "That's cool."

"Yeah," I said. "It really is."

"The Highest Justice"

Holly: Legends of unicorns occur all over the world throughout recorded history. From a unicorn in Persia, described in the fourth century as having a long white horn tipped in crimson, to the German unicorn whose single horn broke into branches like a stag, to the fierce Indian unicorn, black-horned and too dangerous to be taken alive. There's the kirin in Japan, with a deerlike body, a single horn, and a head like a lion or wolf. And there's the medieval European unicorn, with the beard of a goat and cloven hooves.

No matter the origin, the unicorn is usually thought to be a solitary creature whose very body possesses the power to heal. The legends describe it as elusive and beautiful, fierce and strange.

In fact, such is the mysterious draw of the unicorn that originally the story that follows was meant to be a zombie story. Somehow the power of the unicorn caused the story itself to switch sides.

Garth Nix's "The Highest Justice" draws on the association between unicorns and kings. The Chinese qilin presaged the death of Emperors. The heraldic unicorn shows up on coats of arms, including the Royal Arms of Scotland and England. And in "The Highest Justice," a unicorn takes an even more direct interest in a royal family.

Justine: That is so unconvincing. Emperors and kings. Noble families. You're just saying unicorns are stuck-up snobs. Zombies are the proleteriat. Long live the workers!

Also, your global list of genetic experiments gone wrong (deer with the head of a lion? Talk about top heavy!) prove nothing about unicorn variation. Everyone knows unicorns are all-white or rainbow-colored. Ewww. Zombies come in all races. There is nothing more democratic than zombies!

It's an outright lie that the power of the unicorn caused the story to switch sides. Garth Nix has always been a unicorn lover! He was supposed to write a zombie-unicorn story. But he messed it up, didn't he? (Dear Readers, you will notice much messing up from Team Unicorn throughout this anthology.)

Holly: Zombies represent the workers? A seething mass out to get us all, eh? That doesn't seem so egalitarian.