Bring On the Night (38 page)

“Cut it when I say!” Spencer shouted. He struggled atop the zombie, whose arms were snaking up to circle the vampire’s neck.

I stepped over and raised my sword. With a yelp, Spencer flipped the child on top of him.

“Now!” His voice was strangled, air cut off by the zombie’s choke hold. “Ciara…”

If I sliced, I could cut them both in half. So I changed my grip on the hilt, pointing the tip straight down.

“God, forgive me,” I whispered as the tears burned my skin.

I stabbed. Spencer screamed.

I yanked upward on the sword, and the boy’s body came with it, its back skewered on the tip.

I tossed the weapon and its victim away and knelt beside Spencer. Blood poured from his stomach where the weapon had pierced him. “Sorry. Are you okay?”

“I will be in a minute.” He stuffed his hands against the wound and took a halting breath. “Thanks.”

“No, thank you.”

We turned to look at the zombie kid. It lay twisted, motionless, like a discarded doll.

I must have whimpered, because Spencer grabbed my shoulders.

“It’s not real.” He shook me, then took my face in his mud- and viscera-caked hands. “Ciara, listen. You didn’t kill it. There was nothin’ to kill. Okay?”

I stared into Spencer’s eyes, as dark as the moonless sky.
But my assent wouldn’t come.

“They’re getting away!” Regina shouted.

I looked up to see a group of maybe twenty zombies staggering up the hill, near the edge of the orange boundary. Then one by one, they disappeared.

With no one to order us not to, we followed, Shane in the lead. He lurched to a stop at the top of the hill, waving his arms for balance. I almost crashed into him from behind.

There was a hole in the ground, the width of a human body.

I stepped back. “I’m not jumping in there. There’s no way to tell how deep it is.”

“Yeah, there is.” Shane dropped to his knees and put his ear to the hole. “I hear footsteps going that way.” He pointed toward the fence. “So it can’t be that deep.”

“They’re heading into Sherwood?” I looked up the hill to the chapel. “The Underground Railroad tunnel! Lori says it used to lead to a church downtown.”

We looked at each other, a quintet of amateur zombie killers, asking the unspoken question. Did we dare follow?

Way back in the heart of the cemetery, the ZC and Enforcement agents were well occupied. Based on the screams, a little too occupied.

“I’ll go first.” Shane slipped his sword into his scabbard, missing it the first two tries. Then he gave me a grim smile and lowered himself into the hole. We heard a loud “Oof!”

A moment later Shane shouted, “All clear. It’s about a fifteen-foot drop. Ciara, you come next and I’ll catch you. The rest of you are on your own.”

I sheathed my weapon and hurried into the abyss. I tried not to scream as I dropped into Shane’s arms, and mostly succeeded.

We stepped aside. Regina, Noah, and Spencer landed lightly as cats.

The tunnel was nearly pitch-dark even to my vampire eyes. I stepped on something soft and realized it was a broken patch of sod the size of the hole—a trapdoor for the zombies to fall through. No wonder their escape route hadn’t been seen ahead of time.

I put out my hands to feel muddy walls that seemed to be reinforced with wooden beams. A few steps away from the hole, the tunnel’s height decreased dramatically, brushing the top of my scalp.

“Watch your heads,” I told them. “Well, not Regina.”

“See, there’s advantages to being short,” she said. “Of course, this humidity will ruin my hair.”

“Shh.” Spencer stopped. “What was that?”

A flashlight flicked on behind us. “It was the sound of me not chopping your loud asses in half.” Elijah stepped forward from the direction of the chapel. In the same hand as the flashlight, he wielded the biggest battle-ax I’d ever seen. “For now, at least.”

“How did you get out of custody?” Shane asked him.

“Colonel Lanham sprang me right after midnight. Once he got Tina alone, she recanted the whole testimony, said her dad put her up to it. Lanham brought me here and then left to find Petrea.”

“How do we know we can trust you?” Regina said. “You could’ve been helping your girlfriend raise those things.”

“Trust this.” Elijah shone the flashlight beam on his left arm, which was now a bloody stump. “All the zombies in my sector came after me. I couldn’t even see, I was at the bottom of such a thick pile.”

I shuddered. “Sounds like an assassination attempt.”

“Felt like it, too. Three of my squad members died saving me. I bet those monsters were just a distraction for the ones who ran away.” He pointed his flashlight at the tunnel’s ceiling, then at the long dark expanse ahead. “Now come on.” Elijah tossed Shane the flashlight and slung his battle-ax over his shoulder. “Time to catch some zombies and the man who called ’em.”

Under the Milky Way

The tunnel got taller as we proceeded, until I could run without knocking my head on the ceiling. Ahead of me, Elijah and Shane hunched as they ran, the latter glancing back to make sure the rest of us were keeping up.

“Some reason why we’re doing this alone?” I said. “Why can’t we call for backup?” It always seemed like the prudent move on TV.

“Shh!” Elijah stopped and turned. “Who we gonna call?” he whispered. “Who we gonna trust? Someone in the Control is behind this. They want to make it go away quietly.” He handed me the ax, then checked the chamber of his Control-issued Glock. “Fuck that shit.”

I tore my gaze away from the dull black pistol, then looked down the tunnel. “So we’re all that stands between the town and two dozen zombies?”

Elijah glanced among us. “Y’all are new at this. I won’t hold it against you if you crap out now.”

I thought of zombies crushing the doors of my fellow Sherwoodians, ripping apart the bodies of real live men, women, and children. Then I looked at Shane, whose eyes held the chivalric fire of a medieval knight.

I traded him the battle-ax for the flashlight, then tightened my grip on my sword. “Let’s go.” I charged to the front to light the way.

While most of my brain was watching out for an ambush, part of it was delighting in the adrenaline pumping through my veins, stretching and strengthening legs that had been shattered only a few minutes ago. I wondered if the same chemical cocktail would give me the nerve to kill the necromancer if it came to that. Sure, I’d dispatched some zombies, but they weren’t alive—or unalive—to begin with.

We slowed near the end of the tunnel. A wooden door lay in splinters, bits of gray flesh clinging to the frame. Beyond the door, a dim bulb shone, so I turned off the flashlight.

Elijah put a finger to his lips and crept sideways through the doorway, his gun raised. Then he beckoned us to follow.

Lori was right—the tunnel led to the basement of a small church. On the far cinder block white wall, a long paper banner proclaimed H
ALLELUJAH,
H
E
IS
R
ISEN!
in several crayon colors.

I glanced at the small crucifix over the broken door.
Great, a Catholic church,
I thought.
Now the other vamps will be afraid to touch anything with their bare hands.
Not that I could blame them. If this place really was consecrated, maybe even the walls and doors could burn us. Though I had opened the door of St. Michael’s without hurting myself.

I quickly assessed the size of the basement room.
A small Catholic church, within running distance from Sherwood cemetery.

“We’re under St. Michael’s,” I whispered to Shane.

Feet thumped and dragged on the floor above us. We crept to the foot of the wooden staircase, which, if I remembered correctly from our last visit, led to the sanctuary.

Amid the shuffling, a male voice rose and fell while an organ played in the background. If all the zombies we’d followed were in the room upstairs, we were outnumbered more than three to one—and that wasn’t counting any humans or vampires that might be up there.

Elijah beckoned me and Shane away from the staircase.

“We can’t go in until we know what we’re dealing with,” he whispered. “Without recon, it’d be suicide.”

Shane indicated a cellar door at the back of the building. “I’ll go out and around and try to see through the front window.”

Elijah nodded. “Get their number and position and look for weapons and bystanders.”

“Wait.” I pointed to a small, high window facing the street, covered by a thick black cloth. “Faster to go out that way, rather than run down the alley to the next block and come around.”

“But I can’t fit through that window,” Shane said.

“I can.” I hurried over to the wall beneath the opening. “Boost me.”

Reluctantly, Shane knelt and held out his hand for me to step into. With his help, I shimmied up the smooth painted concrete wall, then swept aside the curtain, unlocked the window and slid it ajar, silently thanking the church’s maintenance folks for keeping the hinges lubricated and quiet.

Shane pushed me higher, and I slid through the window onto the sidewalk, into the snow.

Wait. Snow? It hadn’t been cold when we left the cemetery.

A breeze came up, twirling the flakes into the air. I realized they were cherry blossoms, prematurely torn from the tree limbs by last night’s storm. The sight made me sad, as
if spring itself had been dismembered by a jealous, violent summer.

I stuck my hand through the open window. “Sword,” I whispered. “Just in case.”

“Be careful.” Shane handed me the katana, then gave me a penetrating gaze. “Promise?”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll text you with whatever I see. Turn your phone on and make sure it’s set to vibrate.”

“It’s already on, and yes, on vibrate.”

“I’m so proud of you.” I blew him a kiss, then stood up, brushing the cherry blossom snow off my butt. I crept up the front stairs and peered through the smoky glass window. As I’d hoped, the sanctuary doors on the other side of the vestibule were closed. I opened the well-oiled exterior door and slid inside.

On one side of the vestibule, the side without the confessional booths, a small diamond-shaped window opened onto the sanctuary. I crept beneath it and listened.

Colonel Petrea’s voice, clear and cold as a starry winter’s night, rang out over the insidious organ chords. He chanted in a foreign language, maybe Romanian. I thought of Aaron and felt a rush of vengeful rage.

When Petrea paused at the end of each line, other voices echoed his. If they were his Immanence Corps henchmen I’d seen two nights ago, they were human.

I opened up a new text message to Shane:

PETREA
+
HUMANS
? I struggled so hard against the new compulsion to text in complete sentences, my thumbs cramped.

I sent the message, then started a new one:

# C
AS
=

I slowly stood to bring my eyes level with the lowest tip
of the diamond-shaped window.

Oh my.

Zombies filled the front church pews, facing Petrea as he chanted at the top of the stairs in front of the altar, gloved hands held palm up toward the ceiling. I almost expected them to pick up the hymnals and join him in song. I quickly scanned the rest of the personnel, confirming the identity of the IC agents, then ducked down and filled in the numbers before sending my text message to Shane:

24 + 4
HUMAN IC, 1 @ ORGAN & 3 @ ALTAR NEAR PETREA. HUMANS ALL ARMED.

I watched the mailbox icon appear on my phone and wondered if twenty-four had a special significance. Then Petrea’s voice boomed out in his faintly accented English, stopping my heart.

“Come forward, Monroe Jefferson!”

My head jerked up, too fast and too far. I slid back against the wall to hide. A few moments later, my phone vibrated in my hand. Shane’s hastily typed message appeared:

TJEY HVE MONRPE.

So Shane could hear what was happening in the sanctuary from the basement. Maybe he and Elijah and the rest had moved part way up the stairs.

I dared to put an eye to the window. In the choir box, Monroe slowly sat up. Then he shuffled out to stand beside the altar, head bowed. His signature white hat, usually immaculate, was crumpled in his hands. He clutched and grasped at it like a dog gnawing a bone.

I wrote back to Shane:

THEY THREATEN HIM WE MOVE OK?

OK
, he replied.

Petrea was speaking in that language again, and as my brain tried to discern a pattern, it seemed to get sticky, like each thought was a step through deep mud.

I shook my head hard, wanting to plug my ears but knowing that would be dumb. With what felt like my last rational thought, I forwarded to Colonel Lanham all the text messages I’d just sent Shane. Elijah would be pissed, but I knew we couldn’t handle this alone, especially with my mind feeling so… um… where was I?

I straightened up, examining my surroundings, wondering how I got there. Fear pulsed through me, alternating with serenity. Not real serenity but rather the kind that comes from nitrous oxide or codeine. Dental visit serenity.

The sanctuary fell silent. My phone vibrated again, but when I looked down it wasn’t a text message. Shane was calling me. How sweet. Maybe he knew how I’d gotten here.

I tapped the green Answer box on the screen and put it to my ear.

“Don’t talk,” Shane whispered. “Petrea got quiet all of a sudden. Can he see you?”

My buzz vanished, as if my head had been doused in ice water. I realized that in my stupor I had moved in front of the window. Petrea was staring straight at me.

All my muscles froze, like those of a deer waiting to see if the wolf will give chase.

He shifted his focus to the front pew of zombies. With a curve of his gloved forefinger, he beckoned the closest one on his left, opposite Monroe. It shambled forward, a hulking brute of a corpse, a head taller than Monroe and twice as wide.

Petrea looked straight at me as he placed his hand on the
zombie’s shoulder and said, “Kill this man.”