Dangerous Women (93 page)

A fine red curtain of rage descended on Michelle. “I’m talking about zombies attacking a parade,” she whispered. “Killing people in the crowd—and they were coming for me and Adesina.”

“You fucking think I’d do something like that, Bubbles?” Joey’s voice was tremulous. It sounded worse than when they’d been in the People’s Paradise of Africa and Joey had been running a hundred-and-four-degree fever. The hairs on Michelle’s arms rose.

“Are you saying there’s another wild carder who can raise the dead? Am I going to have to deal with two of you?” The red veil lifted, just long enough that another horrible thought slipped in. What if this had been just the first wave?
Honestly,
she thought.
Enough with the goddamn zombies already.

The laugh that came over the line was hollow and mirthless. “For a smart bitch, you’re awful fucking stupid. Obviously, we need to fucking talk. When can you get to my house?”

“I’m stuck here,” Michelle replied. She looked around at the wounded on the float and the cops trying to get the crowd cleared out. There was zombie ick all over the sidewalks, and Michelle really wanted to smack Joey hard. “I’m kinda busy.”

“Just get here quick as you can.”

The connection went dead. Michelle stared at the blank screen.

“Are we going to Aunt Joey’s now?” Adesina asked, tugging on Michelle’s dress.

“Soon,” Michelle replied, surveying the ruins of the parade. “Soon.”

If there was one thing Joey hated, it was nosey cocksuckers sniffing about her business. Not that Bubbles was usually a nosey cocksucker. Given what she said had happened at the parade, Joey could even understand her being fucking pissed. But now she had to explain what was going on with her children.

The problem was that she had no idea.

One minute she’d been making her way back from the bakery up the street—early, because it was Mardi Gras, and there would be tons of tourist dickweeds otherwise—and the next thing she knew, it was as if a light had just shut off inside her head. Usually, she knew where every dead body lay for miles around, and she often had zombie bugs and birds moving about keeping an eye on things. And today had been no different, until the lights went out.

She’d been “blind” for a few hours, and then, just as abruptly, her power was back. Truth be told, she’d been out of her mind while her power was gone. And she’d been scared. Really scared. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been this frightened.
Yes, you can remember that time,
whispered a voice in the back of her mind. But Joey shut that thought down hard and fast—or tried to.
What did your mother say about lying?
the voice persisted.
Well, she’d lied, too,
Joey reminded herself. Her mother had lied, and left Joey alone, and what had happened after that …

Then Bubbles had shown up on her caller ID, and Joey had been relieved. Bubbles was the most powerful person she knew. Bubbles would keep her safe.

But when Joey picked up the phone, Bubbles started giving her shit. But Joey didn’t know what had happened. And if she was being honest with herself, she was scared. What if she was losing her power?

Without her children, she wasn’t safe. Without them, she was just Joey Hebert, not Hoodoo Mama. Without Hoodoo Mama, no one, not even Bubbles, could protect her.

And when she thought about what not being Hoodoo Mama anymore would mean, she began to shake.

There wasn’t much that Adesina didn’t like. She liked American ice cream, American TV, and American beds. Ever since Momma had brought her to America, Adesina had been making a list of all the things she liked.

She liked Hello Kitty, the Cartoon Network, and taking classes from a tutor (even though sometimes she missed being in school with other kids). She even liked the way the cities looked. They were so big and shiny, and everyone talked so fast and moved around like they were all in a big rush to get somewhere important. Even if it was just to go to the grocery store.

And she liked Momma’s friends. Aunt Joey (even though when they’d lived together in the PPA, Momma had kept yelling at Aunt Joey about her language), Aunt Juliette, Drake (even though he was a god now and they never saw him anymore), and Niobe. Sometimes they were invited to
American Hero
events, and she got to meet even more wild carders. But she liked Joker Town the best of all because no one there ever turned around and stared at her.

And she had liked being in the Joker Town Halloween parade with Momma, but she didn’t like this parade now at all. Aunt Joey’s zombies had attacked, and people were hurt. So they were going to Aunt Joey’s, and Adesina knew Momma was mad. She didn’t need to go into Momma’s mind to know that. It was pretty obvious.

Once, she and Momma had had a conversation about her ability to enter Momma’s mind. Momma had made her promise she wouldn’t do it anymore, but it was difficult to control. Once she’d gone into someone’s mind, it became easier. She couldn’t go into nats’ minds—only people whose card had turned. She’d discovered that while they were still in the PPA.

And she wasn’t going to tell Momma that she had already been in more people’s minds than Momma knew. Sometimes it just happened when she was dreaming, but mostly it happened if she liked someone. The next thing she knew, she was sliding into their thoughts.

The police and ambulances came. The ambulance took the wounded away, and the police cleared out the crowd so the parade could head back to the storage facility. There was no more music, no more beads thrown, and no more bubbles.

Adesina didn’t mean to, but she found herself in Momma’s mind. Momma was worried. Worried about Aunt Joey and what she might have to do to her if Aunt Joey really had made her zombies attack. She was worried about Adesina and how much violence she was around. And she was worried about the people who’d been hurt at the parade.

Adesina wanted to tell her that zombies weren’t as bad as being in the charnel pit. And that that wasn’t as bad as what had happened to her after she’d been injected with the virus and her card had turned. Even though Adesina’s mind wanted to skitter away from that memory, it rose up. She couldn’t—wouldn’t—forget what had happened.

The doctors had grabbed her and strapped her down to the table with brown leather straps that were stained almost black in places. Then they slid a needle full of the wild card virus into her arm. She’d looked away and stared up at the sweet, fairy-tale pictures they’d put on the stark white walls. But the girls in the pictures were all pale, not at all like Adesina.

The virus burned as it rocketed through her veins. She looked away from the smiling children in the pictures and stared at the ceiling. There were reddish-brown splatter marks there. Then blinding pain swallowed her and she was wracked with convulsions. Her body bowed up from the table. She tried not to, but she screamed and screamed and screamed. And then there was darkness and relief when she’d gone into chrysalis form.

The doctors didn’t want Jokers, they wanted only Aces, and so they threw her body into the pit with the other dead and dying children. But she wasn’t dying. She was changing. And while she was cradled in her cocoon, she found that she could slip into the minds of other people infected with the virus.

That was how she’d found Momma. Both of them were floating in a sea of darkness. But Adesina wasn’t lonely anymore, not now that she had Momma.

But if she said anything about that time, Momma would know she’d been in her mind. So she grabbed Momma and made her sit on the throne and cuddled in her lap until the parade came to its final stop.

Bullets flew across the smoking landscape, past the charred and burned wreckage of tanks and jeeps. A grenade exploded next to Dan, and he took a massive amount of damage. His health bar was blinking red, and he was out of bandages.

“Jesus, RocketPac, you were supposed to take that bitch with the grenade launcher out,” Dan snarled into his mic. He’d logged on as soon as he’d gotten home from the parade. “You fucking faggot.”

“Suck my dick, CF,” Rocket replied. Feedback screamed into Dan’s headset. “If you’d given me the suppressing fire, I could have gotten close enough to get a shot off. Go blow a goat, you asshole.”

“Turn down your fucking outbound mic, bitch,” Teninchrecord said to Rocket. “And your goddamn speakers, you big homo. CF, tell me again why the fuck we let this useless scrub onto the team.”

Dan fell back. He’s been using a bombed-out building for cover, but it was clear it wasn’t doing any good. And he needed to find some bandages. If they made it out of this without losing, he was going to kick that useless POS RocketPac off the team. He couldn’t figure out how this team he’d never heard of was pwning them. Especially since they had the utterly fag team name We Know What Boys Like.

A shadow passed in front of the TV. Dan jumped and dropped his controller. “What the fuck!”

“Mr. Turnbull, we need to talk,” Mr. Jones said as he picked up the controller and handed it to Dan. He wore a sleek dark grey suit, a white shirt, and a black tie. No one Dan knew ever wore anything like that. Dan was certain Jones wasn’t his real name, but he could identify with not wanting everyone to know who you were. And Dan didn’t want any more information than necessary about Mr. Jones.

He was afraid of Mr. Jones because Mr. Jones looked like he could snap Dan’s neck without blinking an eye. Mr. Jones reminded Dan of a coiled rattlesnake.

Dan ripped off his headphones and yanked the headphone jack out of his computer. “That’s a voice-activated mic,” he snapped, but his hands were trembling. “I don’t want those dipshits knowing who I am in real life. And I told my dad no one was supposed to come down here when the sign was up.”

Mr. Jones shrugged. “Your father isn’t home and I don’t care about your little game,” he said.

“I did what you asked,” Dan said more defensively than he wanted. “I’ve got the video here on this USB drive.” He stood up and dug around in his pocket until he came up with the lint-speckled drive.

Mr. Jones plucked it from Dan’s fingers, then delicately blew off the lint. “I doubt we’ll need it,” Mr. Jones said, slipping the drive into the breast pocket of his suit. “There are already more than fifty YouTube videos up. More going up by the minute. And the local news interrupted programming to report on it. CNN and Fox are running breaking-news tickers, and we know they’re working up their own spin on things. You did well.”

Dan didn’t know what to say. He was both flattered and scared. “Uh, thanks,” he replied, and jammed his hands into his pockets. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that his CntrlFreak avatar was down.
Shit.

“We may need you to do another small task for us,” Mr. Jones said. He held out a thick manila envelope. “The payment. And a little extra.”

A tingle slid up Dan’s spine as he took the envelope. He thought about touching Mr. Jones’s fingers to see if he was an Ace but, for the first time, it occurred to him that he might be out of his depth. “Sure, dude, whatever,” he said. “But coming to my house, uh, maybe we could meet somewhere else?”

Mr. Jones’s smile was shockingly white against his dark skin. “Looks like your team lost,” he said, nodding at the monitor. “Combat Over” flashed on the screen. “I’ll see myself out.”

Dan took a long, shuddering breath when he heard the front door close. Then he opened the envelope and started counting.

The cab pulled to a stop in front of Joey’s house. Michelle paid the driver, and she and Adesina got out. The house was a dilapidated Victorian with peeling paint and an overgrown garden surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. Dead birds nested in the trees and perched on the utility lines. In unison, they all cocked their heads to the left.

“Knock it off, Joey,” Michelle said as she opened the gate. It gave a screeching complaint.
Has she never heard of WD-40? Even I know about that.
“Save it for the tourists.”

“Caw,” said one of the birds.

“Jerk,” Michelle muttered.

A relatively fresh female zombie answered the door. She wore a cheerful floral print dress and was less filthy than most of Joey’s corpses.
The dead don’t groom,
Michelle thought.
They are so nasty.

“Follow me,” the zombie said. But it was Joey’s voice Michelle heard. All the zombies had Joey’s voice, and that was okay when the zombie was a woman. But it was weird as hell coming from a six-foot-tall former linebacker, as it sometimes happened.

“For crying out loud, Joey,” Michelle said. “I know every inch of this house. You in the living room?”

The zombie nodded and Michelle pushed past it. Adesina flew up to Michelle’s shoulder. “Momma, don’t be too mad,” she whispered.

“I’m just the right amount of mad,” Michelle replied. Then she sighed, paused, and tried to get her mood under control. Adesina was right. Joey never responded well to an angry confrontation. Angry was Joey’s stock-in-trade.

The living room was mostly bare. There were tatty curtains on the windows and a sagging couch against one wall. The new addition to the room was a large flat-screen TV. Across from the TV was Joey’s Hoodoo Mama throne with Joey perched on it. She was slightly built and was wearing a shapeless Joker Plague T-shirt and skinny jeans. There was a shock of red in her dark brown hair and her skin was a beautiful caramel color. A zombie dog lay at her feet, and two huge male zombies flanked her chair.

Michelle and Adesina flopped on the couch. Joey frowned, but Michelle ignored it. “So, you want to explain what happened?”

The zombies growled, and then Joey said, “I had fuck-all to do with it.” Her hands were gripping the arms of her throne, and her knuckles had turned white. “I can’t believe you think I’d do something like that.”

“Are you saying there’s another person whose card has turned, who lives in New Orleans, and who can raise the dead just like you?” Michelle gave Joey her very best “Seriously, what the hell?” look. “That’s a lot of coincidences, Joey.”

“No, there’s not a new fucking wild card who can control zombies,” Joey said leaning forward on her throne. “There’s one who can fucking well snatch powers.”