Trent Jamieson - Death most definite

I'm down and running at a crouch. Someone fires, and I'm not sure if it's them or us. I look back and watch Sam drop neatly through the hole. Her pistol flashes. Lissa's with me, and I don't think she could look more worried than she does. She darts away into the dark and is back in a heartbeat.

"There's three of them. Stirrers."

The moment she says it, their presence floods me. A foulness stings the back of my throat. "At least three," I whisper.

The house is musty and muddy underneath, and I'm getting mouthfuls of spider web. No spiders yet. I follow Don through a scrubby little garden and onto the road.

We don't stop running for three blocks, until we reach Don's brown transit van. Don's bent over, and having a spew. It's the perfunctory vomit of a heavy drinker. I wonder if I'm heading that way, too, since I've been hitting the drink pretty hard of late. Well, that's the least of my worries. Don straightens, wipes his mouth, and jabs his rifle butt at the van.

"In the back," he says to me, as Sam catches up to us.

I slide open the side door and scramble onto the hard bench seat inside. Sam's behind the wheel, Don beside her, and we're off with a squeal of tires. Sam takes the first corner so tightly that I'm thrown out of my seat and hit the corrugated metal floor with a grunt.

"Put your seatbelt on," Sam says. I clamber back into my seat and pull the seatbelt across my waist.

A car horn honks at us as we shoot past, and Sam gives it the finger.

"Keep out of the fast lane, ya dickhead!" Don yells.

Lissa's laughing. "Old people these days."

"You watch who you're calling old," Don says, "or I'll come back there."

Sam concentrates on the road.

"I hate driving in the dark." Don reaches over and flicks on the headlights.

"Don't you say a word," Sam growls.

We take another corner like we're a bunch of drunken hoons on a Friday night, and even with the seatbelt on I nearly slide off the bench again. Sam knows how to drive fast, but this van is hardly handling like it's on rails.

"So you really think Morrigan's involved in this?" I ask Don, as much to distract myself from Sam's driving as for my pressing need to know. The Morrigan argument seems absurd-I saw him wounded and I've known him for as long as I can remember. He talked me out of the nightmare of my break-up with Robyn, he's sat at the table for Christmas dinner. He's walked Molly-possibly more often than I did.

"He's about the only one who could pull it off. The man knows everything, runs everything. And we let him," Don says. "It's probably not a good idea to trust anyone at the moment."

Yeah, which is exactly the right thing to say to someone stuck in the back of a van while the two people up front both have guns. Then again, if they had wanted me dead I suspect that I'd be a corpse by now.

"One thing is certain," Don says, "we need to split up. Morrigan-or whoever's hunting us-wants us to stick together."

"Here?" Sam says.

Don nods. "Yeah, here will do." He smiles back at me. "Milton, not a bad suburb to dump you in. At least it's near the brewery."

Sam swings us off the road, and slams to a halt. Another car beeps its horn as it flies past, but Sam ignores it. "Sorry, Steve. I know you don't want to hear this, but Don's right. Together we're a bigger target."

Of course she was going to side with Don. They're lovers. "Are you two going to split up as well?" I ask, a little petulantly.

Sam nods her head, and I've never seen her look so sad. "That was the plan all along. We just wanted to see each other, before-"

"Before we sort this thing out," Don breaks in, "and make the bastards, whoever the fuck they are, pay." Don's out of the van and is sliding the door open. "Keep breathing. I'm going to try and get in touch with Mr. D. I don't think he knows about this."

"If he does," I say, "then none of it matters, we're all dead."

Don nods. "That we're still breathing makes me believe he doesn't. Mr. D has much more elegant tools at his disposal than guns."

Which is absolutely true. Death stops hearts, and stills brains with a breath. He could have killed every single Pomp with a thought. After all, he is disease, he is misadventure, and he is just stupid bad luck, almost all of which I've encountered in the last thirty-six hours.

"Speaking of which…" He digs around under the front passenger seat. "Aha!" Don passes something to me. A pistol. "Be careful with that, it's loaded."

I look at it like it's a scorpion. Sam rattles off some details about the weapon, which bounce just as rapidly off my skull. All I know is that it's a gun. You point it and squeeze the trigger.

"… You got that?" Sam asks.

"Yeah, um, yeah. Of course."

"We have to go." Don shakes my hand roughly and I wince. There might still be a piece of glass in there. Then he pats me on the shoulder. "You'll be fine."

"Good luck," I say, and wave at Sam. The faux smile she gives me is matched for false cheerfulness by the one I'm wearing. We're chimps surrounded by lions, grinning madly and pretending that the big cats are not circling ever closer, and that it's not all going to end in slashing claws and marrow sucked from broken bones.

"We'll be all right," Sam says. "You take care, and keep that Lissa with you." She glances over at Lissa. "And, you, look after this guy. He's one of the good ones."

"I will," we both say.

Don's already back in the van. I step out and slide the door shut.

Sam's off, crunching the gears and over-revving the engine, leaving me coughing on the edge of the road in a pall of black smoke.

Think she needs to get that gearbox seen to," Lissa says. When I don't reply she looks at me more closely. "Are you OK?"

"I think so." Twin bars of tension run up my neck. I roll my head to the right and the crack's loud enough to make me jolt. I'm edgy all right. If this keeps up I'll be jumping at my own shadow, which might be sensible.

"Just you and me again, kiddo," Lissa says.

"There's worse company." My voice cracks a little. "Much worse. You've-I don't know what I'd-"

"Don't," she says, taking a step away from me, and I know what she means. There's no future for us. There can't be. That's not how this works. No matter what else has happened, she's dead, and I'm alive. The divide is definite.

But it's bullshit isn't it, because she's still with me. I'm not keeping her here. In fact my presence should be doing the reverse. She's a dead girl, and she shouldn't be here, but she is. That has to count for something.

"I hope they make it," I say, all the while wishing that Lissa had made it too. Though if she had, I'd probably be dead.

It's hardly a comforting thought, but there aren't any of those that I can find anyway.

We get a little further away from the road, closer to the rail overpass at Milton. A black car hurtles past, one of those aggressively grille-fronted Chevrolets that must burn through about five liters a kilometer. Its engines howl like some sort of banshee. I cringe, and drop to the ground. The bad feeling-mojo, whatever-coming from the car is palpable and all I can hope is that, at the speed they're going, they don't feel me. And they mustn't, or at least they don't stop. Maybe I'm not seen as a threat.

"Stirrers," I say, "a lot of them." I don't mention that one of them looked very much like Lissa.

Another car follows in its wake, likewise crowded, and this one driven by the reanimated corpse of Tim's father, my Uncle Blake. He's in his golf clothes, and would look ridiculous if his face wasn't so cruel, his eyes set on the road ahead. Once they've passed, I get to my feet and watch them rush up and down the undulations that make up this part of Milton Road.

In just a few moments they've run two sets of lights, nearly taking out a taxi in the process, and are already passing the twenty-four-hour McDonald's and service station, shooting up the hill past the Fourex brewery, leaving mayhem in their wake. Cars are piled up at both intersections, their horns blaring, shattered windscreens glittering.