Richard Kadrey - Dead Set

“I like you better like this,” she said brightly. “It really suits you. All slimy and crawling through sewers, eating shit and rats. Who taught you that? Your mother?” She cocked her head coyly at those final words.

“My mother is a goddess,” said Emmett.

“Your mother is a dumb dead bitch!” Zoe said, her voice getting louder with each word.

Emmett lunged at her. Zoe jumped back, almost knocking over her chair. Emmett grabbed her before she could fall and held her, his warm, wet snake breath in her face.

“I was going to take you out of here,” he whispered. “But now, princess, you get to bleed. Not die, but you get to bleed like Daddy.”

Zoe shook herself free and leaned her elbows on the table. She didn’t care about anything at that moment except shouting loud enough for the whole café to hear. “That’s your threat? I get to bleed? That’s why I came here! You can’t threaten people with what they’re already doing, you fucking retarded lizard!”

Emmett took a step back. Zoe got the feeling that no one had ever yelled at him in such a way before. It felt pretty damned good. The feeling didn’t last long, though. Emmett’s eyes turned upward to the ceiling then back down to meet Zoe’s. “It’s starting.”

Zoe looked up. It was happening just the way she remembered. A dense black cloud swirled around the ceiling, and as the cloud descended, it broke apart into individual, chittering, batlike snake things. This is it. She closed her eyes. Maybe she could fool Emmett by not letting him see her fear, but she couldn’t fool herself. She took deep breaths and squeezed the razor. Her stomach was full of ice. The chittering grew louder and the light grew dimmer. She braced herself for the first bite.

Something slammed into the window and someone was shouting, but it didn’t sound like anyone in the café. Zoe opened her eyes and froze. Her father, pale and sweating, his hair plastered to his forehead, was pounding his fists against the window near where Zoe was sitting. He was yelling to her.

“Zoe! Get out of there!” he screamed.

Emmett turned and let out an airy little chuckle. “A day late and a dollar short, Dad,” he said.

“Zoe! Don’t do this!”

Emmett laughed merrily.

Then the first snake landed on Zoe’s shoulder and dug its fangs into her neck. The pain was electric. Hot and dizzying, it shot through her, making her whole body shake. A bat landed, and then another. Through the pain, she could hear her father calling her name. Emmett was right beside her. She could hear him laughing.

Something snapped. The taut string she’d felt like earlier finally frayed and came apart. Before she knew what she was doing, Zoe was on her feet and screaming. She had the razor in her hand and she was slashing at Emmett’s arms. He whirled and backhanded her across the face. She fell back into the table, then ran at him again, screaming and hacking away at his arms and hands, driving the razor into his chest and slashing his face.

Emmett bellowed, a horrifying, deep-throated roar of pain and fury. But the snakes, which had ignored him until then, were on him. Driven into a feeding frenzy by the scent of his blood, they flew away from Zoe and the others to attack Emmett. An immense, writhing horde of flying snakes forced him to the ground. His hands burst from the ravenous black mass, scattering snakes and reaching for Zoe. She leaped back as Emmett rolled over, crushed under the weight of his starving brothers and sisters.

Zoe turned and burst out of the café door, running to her father. They held each other while, behind them, the other spirits dashed from the café, scattering down the wet, gray street. When the street was clear, Zoe’s father took off his overcoat, wrapped it around her, and they ran back into the city.

They went back to his room. Zoe’s father kept his arm around her the whole way, as if a strong wind might carry her off. It felt good. It felt conspiratorial.

Her father’s coat was big enough that it was easy for her to keep her face hidden behind the collar. She wasn’t sure where they were headed, at first. She was worried that it might be back to the carousel, and was relieved when her father steered them the other way, onto the twisting route to Ouroboros Street. Once they were inside, Zoe limped up two flights of stairs before she realized that her father wasn’t with her. She went back down and found him at the top of the first-floor landing, on his knees and leaning heavily on the wall.

“Dad?” she asked uncertainly.

“I’m all right,” he said, blinking up at her. “I just needed to rest a minute.”

She came down to him. “Let me help you.” They started up the stairs slowly. This time he leaned on her.

“Look at us. A couple of wrecks.”

“If Mom could see us now.”

That made him laugh. They made it up to the fifth floor and Zoe opened the door to his room. Her father collapsed on the bed.

“You need to rest,” Zoe said.

“I think you’re right,” he replied. Then he smiled at her weakly. “You saved me back there. Another feeding right then would have finished me.”

Zoe was looking through the drawers in her father’s unused dresser. She found a couple of worn-looking towels in the bottom drawer and looked up at him as he spoke.

“You’d have done it for me.” She took the towels and went to the bed. She handed him the larger of the two, tossed his overcoat onto a chair, and used the smaller towel to dry her hair.

“Of course I’d have done it for you. I’m your father. It’s part of my job description,” he said, unfolding the towel and wiping his face. “But I don’t know that every kid would have done what you did.”

“ ’Course they would. You would have.”

“Yeah, right,” he said quietly. He looked away from her, balling the towel in his hands. “I’m not so sure I would have done it for my old man.”

Zoe looked down at him. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Part of her was shocked, but another part felt sad for him. Why would he say something like that? She remembered seeing her father differently just a few days earlier, when she’d put on the Animagraph and seen the world through his eyes. It was the night he’d met her mother. She recalled flutters of drunken excitement when he first laid eyes on her, but the feeling was mixed with others Zoe hadn’t paid attention to at the time. Confusion. Silent, sullen rage. And fear, buried way in the back of his mind under all the beer. Something that had happened between him and his father that night. His back and arms ached where the belt had hit him, where it always hit.

Zoe sat down next to him on the bed. He suddenly looked younger to her.

“Yeah, you would have,” she said. “In the end.”

“I’d like to think so.” He turned back to her, took her hand, and smiled. “In case I haven’t told you, you’re a pretty good kid. A pain in the ass, but a pretty good kid.”

“Thanks.”

“It always cracks me up how much you’re like your mom.”

Zoe let go of his hand and went back to drying her hair. “Really? How?”

“No one could ever tell her anything either.” He followed Zoe’s lead and started drying his hair. “Not her parents. Not me. No one. She just did what she thought she had to do. A lot of the time she was right, too.”

“What about when she wasn’t?”

He shook his head and set the towel aside. “Craziness. Complete fucking madness. She got us into as much trouble as she got us out of.” He looked at Zoe. “Just like you.”

Zoe took their wet towels and draped them over the tiny sink in the kitchen area to dry. “I never thought we were much alike.”