Kat Richardson - Underground

The zombie tumbled to the ground, decomposing as it fell. The energy strands slid apart and for an instant two faces looked at me. I gasped. Two? That was all wrong. I stared at the faces—one pleased, one furious—and wondered why the angry one seemed familiar before it flashed away. The other was an Indian—some kind of local Native American, I would guess—and he looked on me benignly for a moment before all cognition faded. He didn’t say anything, didn’t smile or nod, just slowly vanished leaving a sense of profound relief in his wake.

My shoulders sagged and I let my head fall forward as I exhaled. Could have been worse, I supposed. I heard a noise behind me and turned, having forgotten about Will in the pressure of the moment.

Will was staring at me, breathing in panicky pants. “You… you killed that man.”

“Shit,” I muttered. “No, Will. He was already dead.” I tried to close the distance between us, but he backed away from me, so I stopped. “Look at the body. Just look.” I turned my head back to see the rotten pile moldering into dirt as we watched. I glanced at my hands and then at his. A thin greasy dust clung to my fingers where the dead man’s remains had already dropped away. But I saw a knotted thread of blue energy clinging to Will’s fingers and wrapping around his arms where he’d touched the zombie.

I walked toward him again, reaching for his hand to brush the energy strand away, but he jerked back, staring in disbelief at me and then at the pile of dust and dirt beside the now-docile hairy creature. I didn’t know how much of the Grey he could see by dint of the tangle on his hand, but it seemed to be enough. Or maybe he could only see the absence of a body, but that would do. He looked sick and his skin was slick with fear sweat that gleamed in the jaundiced light. He started shaking his head in a stiff manner that signaled the edge of hysteria. I kept my hands where he could see them and stood very still.

“Will,” I said in the calmest tone I could muster. “I didn’t hurt anyone. And I wouldn’t hurt you, either.”

“They attacked you. You—you attacked back!”

“No. They wanted help.”

“You tore that one to pieces!” he shouted, pointing at the drifting pile of dust.

“Will. No. Will, I can’t tear a person up. It can’t be done. The body fell apart on its own. Will. It was a zombie. It wasn’t alive. It was a spirit trapped in a rotting corpse!”

I shouldn’t have yelled. At the sound of my raised voice, Will turned and bolted. I tried to go after him, but the hairy man-creature loped after me and caught me, pulling me back around by the arm.

“Lady, lady, dead lady. Even now.”

“What?” I demanded. “Even for what?” Exasperating thing!

It touched the scarring around its eye. “This.”

“I didn’t do that to you!” I cried, frustrated, horrified, wanting to run away from it, to run after Will, and knowing it was too late.

“This because of you. Scaled man struck me. Because you didn’t come with me.”

I stared at the shaggy thing, halted in my thoughts of Will and forced into another direction. “Scaled man?” I thought hard and came up with pieces that fit. “Wygan? The vampire? The white-haired one?”

It nodded. “Scaled man.”

I swore and spit on the ground, damning him till the air quivered with my fury.

Bloody Wygan! The bastard vampire who’d stuck a knot of Grey into my chest, bound me inextricably to the grid of the Grey for his own reasons and without my consent, and ripped reality in two for me once and for all. So Wygan had sent this bizarre, simple creature to do his dirty work and then punished it for failure. It blamed me as much as him. I didn’t know why Wygan had done any of this and I wouldn’t enjoy finding out—but someday I would.

I take vows seriously. As a kid—pushed into activities and occupations I didn’t choose, forced to pursue my mother’s remodeled dream without heed to my desires—I’d made a vow: to find a way to run my own life, my way. I had done that only to have it all turned on its head. And now, another: I would find out why this had happened to me and what Wygan had done.

The creature patted my chest, wresting me from my thoughts. “Even.” Then it turned and loped off, vanishing into shadows of the Grey that drew around it like curtains.

I looked around, suddenly emptied of rage and action, and was taken in a fit of shaking from cold and a swift: stab of despair. I was alone under the viaduct.

Will was long gone, the dust of the released zombie was already blowing away in the icy breeze off the water, and even the strange moths had disappeared. I clenched my fists tight and felt as if the world was twisting and falling down around me. I stumbled on solid ground, choking on a scream I couldn’t release, and forced myself to walk away, back toward Pioneer Square, away from the empty street under the viaduct. But emptiness came with me, kindled only by the tiny spark of my pledge.

I finished the walk to my truck alone. I drove home in a daze of postconfrontation exhaustion and carried the puzzle box upstairs to my condo, shoving it into a bookshelf at random after the door clicked closed behind me.

Chaos, my ferret, rattled the door of her cage, demanding immediate release. I let her out only to imprison her again against my chest.

“What am I going to do?” I asked the ferret.

Chaos, impatient little beast, wriggled with annoyance as I tried not to break down. I gave up and let her go, dropping onto the sofa and putting my face in my hands. Hot salt water ran against my palms and down my wrists but nothing, not even breath, could pass the stone that seemed to have settled in my throat. I didn’t even have the comfort of howling or sobbing, just stupid, hard tears.

I cried until it stopped hurting and put my head down on the arm of the sofa.

Chaos skipped over to check on me, climbing the upholstery to lick the moisture from my face. “You don’t love me, you just want salt,” I muttered, letting her tiny kisses tickle my cheeks until I stopped feeling so wretched and wrung out.

“What now? I’m not ready to go after Wygan,” I continued. “Not skilled enough for that yet. So… just pick myself up and go on like there never was a William Novak in my life? Yeah, right.”

I wondered what had happened to the thread of Grey that had tangled on Will’s arm. I’d have to check—The ferret stuck her cold nose in my ear.

“Hey!”

She snorted and bounced away, busy as always. Busy.

That’s what Will and I would both do. That’s how we got by; working to avoid dealing with the personal ugliness. He wasn’t likely to let me near him for a while—at least not until he wasn’t so horrified. Much as I wanted to get at that bit of Grey, I’d have to wait and let his mind make some more comfortable suggestion of what had happened before I could. We’d have to talk and it would probably be the last time—I could no more keep on with this mess than he could, after this—and that would be my chance to fix what I could, including the strand, and let the rest go forever. But the Big Break would have to wait for calmer daylight, when there were fewer shadows heavy with reminders of shambling creatures and dark actions under the otherworldly stare of fox eyes and ghostly things.

One of the requirements for my degree in criminal science was a psychology course about criminals and victims of crime. For a week we discussed how victims cope with the results of the crimes—everything from burglary and bank fraud to rape and the murder of loved ones—committed against them. In the end, all traumas elicit one of two major categories of response: break or cope. Breaking down is good for you, I’m told—catharsis and all that jazz—but I rarely indulge in it and never for long. Me, I’m of the suck-it-up school of coping till you crack. So after a night of feeling like a dog that’d been kicked, I dragged myself out of bed, worked out, and went back to my job. But Will was in the back of my mind and I worried in silence while I made myself work.