Kelly Mendig - Three Days to Dead

“Just one.”

Brakes squealed. She spun the car, turning my side to face the street we’d just come down. I used the momentum to leap through the window. I tucked my head down and struck the pavement on my left shoulder, followed through with the roll, and came up unsteadily on my knees. Ungraceful by my standards, but probably the most acrobatic thing Chalice’s body had ever managed.

The world spun, but I steadied fast. The odors of burnt rubber and oil stung my nostrils, sharp and cloying and immediate. Screams faded into the distance. My vision tunneled, focusing only on the rampaging hound, leaving bloody prints everywhere it stepped. I raised the gun, using my left arm to steady it. A car horn honked somewhere, muffled and unimportant.

Down the sight of the revolver, I gazed at the hound. At its chest and hair, to the point where its heart should reside. Each step forward widened the target, but I didn’t need a large field. I had him. I felt it. I squeezed the trigger.

A dark blur on a bicycle toppled over, shrieking in pain.

I screamed. The hound leapt over the flailing biker and landed in a crouch, ready to spring. Epithets poured from my mouth, streaming faster than I could properly articulate, my fury dripping out with each syllable. The hound pounced, its massive body on a collision course with mine. I tucked and rolled without waiting, counting on the hound’s speed to carry its mass over me. Heavy feet hit the pavement. I came up and fired.

The back of the hound’s head exploded, spattering the side of the car with bone and hair and gore. Its body jerked as it fell, still fighting out of instinct even though its brain was gone. It twitched once, twice, then lay still.

“Evangeline, we must go!” Isleen shouted from the car’s interior.

Her commanding voice snapped me back. I stood, fist tight around the gun. Onlookers stared from the safety of sidewalk benches and parked cars, wide-eyed and openmouthed. Some were on their cell phones. No one made a move to help the young man on the bike, who clutched his bleeding thigh with both hands.

I’d shot an innocent.

As a Hunter, it was my duty to protect Joe Citizen. Innocent bystanders were not to become victims of the Dregs and their violence. Yet I had brought that violence on someone by my own hands. I expected revulsion, but felt only pity. Pity that, while shot and in pain, this man would never know the extent of what had happened that day. Getting shot sucked, but being ripped to shreds by a rampaging hound from Hell was a fate far worse.

“Someone call an ambulance,” I said, even as I heard the first faint sounds of sirens.

“Evangeline!”

“Evy, come on!”

Feet first, I slipped back into the car and into a spattering of dark blood. It was on the dash and the edge of the seat, the odor almost more than I could bear. Isleen sped away. I let myself fall back against the seat, still clutching the gun. The muzzle was hot; it scorched my chest. I didn’t care. The heat felt good. The sirens faded.

Alex squeezed his broad shoulders between the seats. Worry clouded his gentle eyes. He touched my cheek, featherlight. Affectionate. “You okay?” he asked.

“No.”

He took quick visual stock and seemed to realize I didn’t mean physically. I wasn’t injured. I just wasn’t okay, either.

“You didn’t shoot that man on purpose,” he said.

“Doesn’t matter. I still shot him.”

“It was an unfortunate accident,” Isleen said. “One you cannot afford to dwell on if you are to complete the task ahead. Much depends on our success. There will be time for self-pity at a later date.”

“For you, maybe.”

Alex winced. Isleen only tightened her fingers around the steering wheel. The leather cover creaked.

I recognized our new direction. She made another turn. A block away stood the fading, deteriorating skeleton of the Capital City Mall. Abandoned fifteen years ago when the new mall opened uptown in Briar’s Ridge, Capital City had slowly rotted away. The vast parking lot was cracked and overgrown with grass and weeds. Time chipped away at the paint and tile walls, mottled glass doors, and rusted delivery bays. Graffiti adorned surfaces no longer repainted.

It was shaped like a U, with the main entrance on the front curve and anchored on both ends by former department stores. Isleen drove across the rear parking lot, and we entered the interior of the canyon, straight across pavement that had once been the patio of a diner, and into a wall.

At least, I thought it was a wall.

But it turned out to be an impressive illusion of a wall, because we drove right through it—down the mosaic tile corridor, past a row of boarded-up storefronts, and straight to the center of the mall. Skylights illuminated a dry fountain that hadn’t run in years. Empty beds surrounded it, devoid of soil and no longer sustaining the dense foliage of yesteryear. It smelled of dust, dry and lonely, and something else I couldn’t place. Something faint, hinting at power. It buzzed in the air, a gentle caress from an invisible hand. I felt the energy of Isleen’s Sanctuary.

Alex and I climbed out on the driver’s side. I’d had my fill of going in and out of car windows. My sneakers squeaked on the floor and echoed harshly in the oppressive silence. We followed Isleen past abandoned kiosks, benches that hadn’t held someone’s weight in over a decade, and stores long boarded up and forgotten.

The odor of the hound’s blood followed us, absorbed in my clothes. I’d have to change soon or be stuck with the offending stench—not something I cared to live with. I’d been covered with it twice in twenty-four hours.

“Do you feel it, Evangeline?” Isleen asked. Somehow, her voice did not echo. It simply hung in the air.

“What should I be feeling?” I replied, even though I did feel it. There, yet intangible, like static electricity.

“You’ll know.”

“If it helps,” Alex said quietly, “I don’t feel anything.”

“Nor should you,” Isleen said.

He shrugged it off, taking no offense at the dig. The shell shock seemed to have worn off a bit, and he was taking in his surroundings, absorbing salient details, remembering. I reached out and curled my fin-gers around his. He squeezed back.

Isleen turned down a narrow service corridor, past a bank of pay phones that advertised local calls for a dime. A few more yards down, she stopped in front of a veneered door. I stared at the blue plaque pasted to the wall next to it.

“Are you serious?” I asked. “This is the Sanctuary?”

She nodded.

Alex blanched. “The women’s bathroom?”

“We do not choose the locations,” Isleen said. “However, once the Breaks are discovered, we do what we can to protect them. Why do you think this mall was rendered inoperable and closed down?”

“Bad Chinese at the food court?” I said.

A flutter of her eyelids was the closest Isleen got to rolling her eyes at me. She pushed the door open. I swallowed before following her inside, prepared for an onslaught of horrible smells and disgusting sights—rotting waste and stained floors, stale urine and broken mirrors.

Instead, the faintest hint of incense, tangy and bitter, tingled my nostrils. Candles adorned the polished sinks and counters, their light reflected by the spotless mirrors. Plush, forest green carpet covered the floor. The stalls had been removed. Three toilets were covered and resembled comfortable side chairs. The air was warm, but not oppressive. It felt inviting, almost invigorating. All-encompassing. My entire body tingled. I tried to ignore it, to dim the sensation lest I fly apart.

“I’ve never felt anything like it before,” I said.

“This is the fanciest bathroom I’ve ever seen,” Alex blurted out.