Cameron Haley - Skeleton Crew

“There’s got to be a better way, Chavez,” I said. “You could get one of those headsets. This is embarrassing-it’s like a guy buys a car and then hitches it to his plow horse. No offense, ladies.”

“Chola,” he said, glancing up at me, “we got a major concentration of Zeds moving south out of downtown.”

There were red dots scattered all over the three-dimensional profile of the city superimposed on the parchment.

The clump of dots at Santa Fe and Fourth Street was so large and densely packed it looked like Chavez had gotten a nosebleed.

I nodded at the map. “The bean-sidhe are feeding you the locations?”

“Yeah, we got ’em hooked right into the map. We’re getting updates in real time.”

“Okay, then just send some big hitters over there to clean it up. Where’s Amy Chen’s crew?”

“She’s over in Leimert Park, D. Fucking gentrification, we don’t have the juice boxes there we used to. The civilians are holed up in their churches, and Zed’s hitting them like fucking Oki Dog after last call.”

“Where are Jack and Honey?”

“With Ismail Akeem in Koreatown. The real problem is we got a Stag platoon down there.”

“Why is that a problem? Where are they?”

Chavez reached down and pulled the three-dimensional image toward him, zooming in on the intersection. There was a tiny clump of blue dots surrounded by all the red ones.

Chavez pointed to an old brick building with green freight doors. “They’re pinned down in the produce warehouse.

They were trying to pull some civilians out of the lofts across the street when Zed overran them. They lost a couple guys, but they were able to pull back in time. Lowell’s leading them and he doesn’t want to call in reinforcements.”

Looking at all the red dots surrounding his position, I couldn’t really blame him. “They can’t shoot their way out?”

“There’s less than thirty of them, chola, and at least five hundred Zeds outside.”

Guess not. “What about the sidhe?”

Chavez snorted. “Oberon is mostly staying in Hollywood and the turf you gave up in South Central. Says his people can’t hack it out in the cold. Anyway, it’s good because he’s taking care of business on his streets.”

I nodded. The fairy king had told me what I could expect. “Where’s Mr. Clean?”

“That scary motherfucker is everywhere, but he ain’t exactly checking in.”

“Okay, Adan and I can go pull the government out of the fire. How’s everything else look?”

Chavez opened his mouth to speak and then spread his arms over the map. “Hell if I know, chola. Maybe better than it was a few hours ago but still not too fucking good? It’s like you said-it’s a numbers game and I always copied off you in math class.”

“Fuck that, Chavez, we both copied off your girlfriend.”

“Oh, yeah.” His eyes drifted away and a little smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “What was her name, chola?”

“Their name was Maria.”

“That’s right. Las Tres Marias. They were good at math.”

“So you’re telling me you don’t know if we’re winning.”

“I’m telling you I don’t even know when I’ll know. When there’s no more red dots on the map, I guess. It goes like this for a while and you think you’re getting ahead of it, and then a Zed pack gets inside an apartment building or a hotel or something, and if we don’t get there fast enough the map starts lighting up again.”

“We’re doing everything we can, Domino,” Adan said. “It’ll have to be enough.”

“Or it won’t,” I said.

“It will. Are you ready to go?”

“Give me a few minutes. Mr. Clean makes me nervous and I won’t have a chance to check on him if I don’t do it now.”

Adan nodded. “I’ll go look in on the kids.”

A little tinge of jealousy snuck up on me from behind and squeezed my cheeks. I turned away, walking over to the leather couch and collapsing on the soft cushions. “You need some singles?” I said, digging in the front pocket of my jeans. Adan stared at me blankly. “For the dancers…you put a dollar in their…never mind, country boy.”

“I’m not going for a dance, Domino,” Adan said.

Chavez looked back and forth between us, grinning. “It’s a strip club, chola. It doesn’t cost anything to look.”

“Fuck you, Chavez. Go, Adan.” I waved him away and closed my eyes. Sarcasm and snark can be deadly weapons, but when they misfire they can really make you look like a clown-the goofy variety, not the scary ones. I didn’t even care if Adan wanted to take another peek at the dressing room. I might have worried about him if he didn’t. Why did I have to say something? Why couldn’t I have said something that was actually funny? Why did fucking Chavez have to hear it?

I took a deep breath and beat the moment of schoolgirl awkwardness back into the closet. Then I conjured an image of Mr. Clean in my mind, tapped the abundant juice pulsing through the club and spun my peekaboo spell. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” I said.

At first I thought my spell had failed. The image that sprang up behind my closed eyelids was a gray, color-streaked frenzy of motion-blurred chaos. Then the image froze, instantly, and I found myself looking down at an expansive pile of headless zombies. A massive scimitar of silvered steel extended into my view and dripped crimson from the razor-sharp edge.

“Get out of my head,” said Mr. Clean. “You know I hate that.”

“Yeah,” I said, smiling. “Anyway, technically, you don’t really have a head. You’re a spirit.”

“I do have a head, as I am at present manifest in the physical world, and indeed you demonstrate that my head possesses within it far more productive material than does yours.”

“That was a hell of a sentence, Mr. Clean. You might need to diagram that motherfucker for me.”

The jinn’s sigh murmured in my mind. “What do you want, Dominica? As you can see, I’m busy. I was about to set upon a strip mall where the dead are, as we speak, causing great distress to the locals.”

“Well, I’ll let you set upon it in a second. Seriously, what’s with all the verbosity? Are you feeling okay?”

“The carnage is invigorating,” said Mr. Clean. “I am lifted on wings of slaughter and soar on the hot, red currents of sublime and exquisite war.”

“If you’re having such a good time, maybe we can renegotiate the price.”

“Not a chance.”

“Didn’t think so. Where are you?”

Mr. Clean laughed. “Where is the hatred in a man’s heart? Where is the plague that steals silent and unseen through the village streets while the children lie dying in their beds? Where is the-”

“What’s the fucking address, Mr. Clean?”

“I’m in Northridge.”

“War is hell,” I said. I had the jinn working the Valley because he could move faster than my gangsters and the juice was probably thin enough out there to give the sidhe respiratory problems. Mr. Clean could cover more ground than anyone else I had on my side of the zombie apocalypse. “What are you doing with the heads?” We hadn’t really gotten into the details, and I’d been worried about it since we closed the deal. I did not want to go home to a condo full of zombie heads.

“As you did not specify a location for proper disposal, I am leaving them where they fall.” I saw the scimitar point down to the pavement where one of the zombie heads lay on its right cheek. It stared up at me-at Mr. Clean-out of the corner of one filmy, gray eye. It snarled and gnashed its teeth.

“I hope the Xolos are quick about cleaning up the mess. That’s going to be hard to pass off as LSD in the water supply.”