Deader Still

34

We needed to find a way out of this subterranean madhouse, and if we were lucky, we’d find Mina as well, so Jane and I could recover the painting.

We had to get moving. I looked down into a sea of flailing arms and undead eyes. The zombies couldn’t climb, but there were enough of them that they threatened to topple over the already precarious stack of crates.

“You know,” Jane said as she tried to keep her balance, “they seemed a lot less scary when they were working in the typing pool at the Sectarian Defense League.”

The crate underneath me shifted and I jumped to hers as mine fell away and disappeared into a group of zombies.

“Time to go,” I said. Jane nodded and reached for my hand, hitting my wrist by mistake. I yelped.

Jane jumped back, almost toppling over, then started digging through her shoulder bag. “Hold on a second.”

“Is that . . . ?”

Jane nodded. “The Greater and Lesser Arcana Welcome Kit, yeah. A little more fashionable than the one you guys have, and easier to wear in the field, too.”

Jane pulled out two dirty-looking finger-shaped rolls of bandages and placed one against each of my wrists.

“Mummy Fingers?” I said. I haven’t seen them since . . .”

“You found me lying in the alley outside your apartment,” Jane dashed out. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just hold still.”

Magic caressed the area as the bandages uncoiled themselves and proceeded to wrap around each of my wrists. The sensation felt creepy as hell, like a snake slithering against my skin, but when it was done, I could feel the healing, or at least painkillers, kicking in.

“Better?” she asked.

I nodded. “Okay. Let’s try our great escape again,” I said, and this time I grabbed for her hand first. “Let’s go.”

I jumped for the next set of crates just as the ones we were standing on toppled over. Leaping from crate to crate, we made our way to the far end of the darkened room. Halfway across the vast expanse, Jane overtook me and started going off in a direction different from the one I thought we should be headed in.

“Uh, Janey?” I said, almost losing my balance as I changed my course. “You sure this is the right way out?”

“Just follow me,” she snapped, a little bit of her darkness resurfacing. “We don’t have time for that male macho bullshit over directions.”

Considering how lost I had been by the time I had found Mina earlier, I shut up and followed. As the end of the room got closer, Jane dove over the edge down to ground level with her blond ponytail streaming out behind her. I followed, landing on my feet, thankfully not needing to use my hands to steady myself.

Jane, however, hadn’t landed on her feet. She was lying on the floor, intertwined in a pile of limbs with Mina. The Scream stood swaying nearby, precariously balanced on one of the crate corners that threatened to tear through the canvas. Art won out over chivalry and I dashed over to the painting to save it. I guess it showed where my priorities were.

When I turned back to the two of them, Mina was already throwing Jane off of her and getting to her feet. In Mina’s hand was my bat, but before she even realized what was going on, Jane snatched it away from her.

“No problem,” Mina said, turning her attention to Jane. “I can handle Miss Needs to Dye Her Roots without it.”

Jane gave her a pained smile. “Natural blonde here. That red of yours looks straight out of the box.”

The low moan of the approaching zombies came from behind me, sounding much closer than I had expected. I turned my attention away from the two women, but not before I saw Jane flip herself up into a standing position from prone on her back.

“Here’s the thing, bitch,” Jane said, again using harsher language than she normally did. “If you’re going to mess with someone like Simon, you want to keep in mind who his friends are . . . and in this case, who his girlfriend is.”

It was of some comfort that Jane still thought of us as a couple, despite the past few days.

“Ladies . . .” I started, but I could no longer spread my attention between the oncoming zombies and them. I didn’t know which I found scarier—Jane’s attitude or the approaching brain munchers. “Jane! Bat! Now!”

She tossed it to me and I caught it, spinning it until I had the handle firmly in one of my hands.

Holding the bat like it was a rapier, I poked several of the approaching zombies back into the others, causing a delay in their advance as they stumbled around. It slowed them, I hoped, to the point where I could deal with only one or two at a time, but I wasn’t sure how long I could make that last, with more and more piling up behind them. I caved in the head of the closest one with a noisy squelch and chanced a look over at Mina and Jane.

Mina threw herself toward Jane, but I could see desperation and fear in her wild eyes. Jane, on the other hand, looked pissed off and determined, a look I hoped I never found myself on the receiving end of in our relationship. The two of them fought. Mina had fighting technique on her side, but fear was making her sloppy and Jane was blocking everything Mina threw at her with ease. Even with constant blocking, though, Jane had been pushed back up against the wall, almost smashing her head into a junction box and leaving her with nowhere to go. I had to help her.

Room-temperature fingers raked against my neck and another set dug into my gold shirt, pulling at it until it tore. I spun back around. Three of the zombies had closed in on me, and the one with its fingers on my neck moved in for a bite, its putrid breath hitting me full in the face.

I grabbed the bat tight with both hands and brought it up in a circular swing, hoping to knock away the arms clawing at me. It worked, almost too well. Both of the zombie’s arms snapped free and went flying off into the darkness, landing with a wet thud.

“Do . . . not . . . WANT!” I grunted as I started swinging like wild to fight off the squickening sensation of having literally disarmed them. Something slimy dripped down my face but I ignored it in my berserker rage.

Winding up like one of the Yankees, I drove back the closest three with one swipe.

Jane screamed from behind me. I turned back around. Mina had slammed her into the wall, and though hurt from the impact, her eyes were dark with anger.

Mina stopped beating Jane long enough to look over at me. “You like watching a little girl on girl? Or maybe you just like watching me kick your girl’s ass . . .”

Despite the look on Jane’s face, it was clear she was getting her ass kicked now, but what could I do? The zombie hits just kept on coming and I wasn’t getting any closer to helping her.

Not that I needed to. Right then, Jane reached her hand out along the wall, coming in contact with the metal junction box she had almost clocked herself on. She opened her mouth to speak, but instead of words, out sprang that sound of a thousand modems dialing for connection, louder than I had heard it before. Mina’s hair started to rise as if charged with static. Then I felt mine do the same. One of the darkened fluorescent tubes blinked to life overhead, glowing brighter than it should have until it shattered as if from a massive overload. Electricity shot from the open sockets and rained down and through both the zombies and Mina, but not channeling through me.

The remaining zombies, as electrified as they were, didn’t have the capacity to react to pain, but instead kept coming until something in their wiring cooked to the point that they fell to the floor, smoldering. The smell of burnt hair and charred meat mixed with that of rotting flesh and I gagged.

Mina was screaming bloody murder behind me. Unlike the zombies, she felt everything that was happening to her, and I realized that at this point Jane was actually electrocuting her.

“Jane,” I called out. “Stop.”

Jane’s eyes stayed focused on Mina, but she made no motion to detach herself from the junction box. Sparks were pouring from the ceiling in a cascade around Mina’s still-twitching form.

“Jane,” I shouted, reaching for her, but stopped short. I hadn’t been trained in how technomancy worked. I wasn’t sure if I’d electrocute myself in the process or not. Still, I couldn’t let Jane kill someone, not while I had a chance to do something about it. I ran between her and Mina, fully passing into the stream of electricity arcing to her.

Although the power only arced into me for a few seconds as I cut across its path, it was like getting kicked hard-core in the breadbasket, except given the intensity of it all, my whole body felt like it was the breadbasket getting kicked.

Jane faltered when she saw me take the hit and her one hand dropped from the junction box as she screamed.

The electricity in the air dissipated and the two women both slumped to the floor. Shaking from my jolt, I caught Jane just before her head hit the ground. Her eyes were open, but they stared ahead, blank and unmoving.

“Jane?” I said, worried. “Come on back to me. We’ve still got a lot of arguing to get on with in our lives and I can’t have it be all one-sided. C’mon now . . .”

I hugged her to me and felt her gasp in a deep breath. She started to sob.

“Where were ya just now?” I said, laughing a little with relief. “You were looking a little Voldemort around the gills there for a minute. We should probably talk about that.”

“I’m sorry,” Jane said, repeating it over and over, rocking back and forth in my arms as we sat there on the floor. “I couldn’t stop myself. I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry . . . I didn’t kill her, did I?”

I turned to check on Mina, but was surprised to see she wasn’t lying there anymore. And once again The Scream was gone also.

“I think she’s going to be just fine,” I said.