Roadkill (16 page)

Niko said, “Goodfellow, hold his head. I’ll check his pupils.”

I guess that answered that.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. Hey, cut it out,” I protested as I tried to duck, but when Niko was serious, there was no avoiding him. His hand secured my chin tightly as he stared into my eyes as the overhead lights of the gas station canopy flickered to life when the dusk swallowed the sun.

“They’re not dilated or pinpoint.” He frowned. His hand was on my neck. “Your pulse is elevated, but only mildly.”

“So you mean normal, right?” I demanded, my good mood—which I was allowed for once in my life, damn it—disappearing.

“I can’t imagine normal being applied to you in any way—hygiene, diet, exercise habits, literary or video preferences,” he replied immediately. “But you don’t seem drugged.” His frown deepened. “Let me do a reflex test.”

I was more than willing to prove my reflexes were fine by grabbing Salome by her tail and beating my brother over the head with her hairless, bony body, but Delilah interrupted all that. She pulled up on her motorcycle and said sharply, “Stop silly games. Found something. Up the road. Come.” She didn’t wait, roaring off. We were ten miles from Dyer, Indiana, where there had been, per the almighty Google, another meningitis outbreak—more dead, cold and still in the hospital morgue. Suyolak was still definitely on the Lincoln, and we were on his diseased trail.

Indiana was a big change from New York. Corn, corn, cows just for a change, and then more corn. It was old times all over again. Traveling from town to town with Sophia, draining the marks there dry, then moving on. Then after the Auphe took me and I came back, there was running for our lives instead of simply being pulled along in Sophia’s wake as she searched for new marks. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this road trip. In some ways it had me looking over my shoulder for creatures that didn’t exist anymore. But in another way . . . it felt right. Comfortable. We might not be accepted by the Rom, but we
were
Rom, born to hit the ground running.

While Niko followed Delilah’s taillights past the exit on-ramp and Abelia- Roo’s RV followed us, I used his BlackBerry to scan for disease outbreaks ahead of Dyer. There weren’t any, at least nothing reported yet, but I didn’t doubt they’d pop up. Leaks only got bigger, not smaller. Those seals weren’t going to repair themselves. Goddamn Abelia. It was her responsibility and she’d fucked up. Contaminated ingredients, my ass. It was pure ego. Abelia thought she was better than anyone and everyone, full concentration and effort not needed, but Suyolak was looking to prove her wrong.

Ahead of us, Delilah had pulled over a few miles from the gas station after turning onto a gravel road. “You do realize this could be a trap,” Goodfellow pointed out. “It’s back to nature. A city Wolf might enjoy killing you out here, Cal. An exotic back-to-her-roots vacation with your murder as a cherry on the top. If she is going to kill you, I’d have to commend her for choosing this spot and thinking outside the box. The Kin aren’t usually very good at that.”

“Thanks for that. You’re a true friend. Be sure to take pictures. I’d hate for you to forget any juicy details,” I growled. Although it was as Robin said . . . back to nature, but I thought if or when Delilah made a run at me, it wouldn’t be within sword reach of my brother. She was smarter than that. No, I thought that was something else entirely—but still about death; just not mine.

The interstate noise was gone. There was nothing but crickets and the distant low of a cow. Delilah took off her sunglasses—the moon would be more than bright enough for a Wolf—as we pulled up beside her. She shot a challenging glance toward me. “Yeah, it’s a graveyard,” I said. “I can smell it.” No matter how old they were, I could always smell them. “So what?”

She rolled her eyes as she undid the tie from her hair, setting it loose down her back—a cascade of moonlight. “Like teaching cub. Smell again.”

I did, sampling the air. “Shit, it’s closer.”

“Graveyards, as a rule, don’t move around on their own,” Niko observed, turning the ignition off and stepping out of the car to draw his katana from the sheath strapped to his back and hidden by a lightweight duster. We all suffered in the summer when it came to concealing our weapons. “Cal, are you up for this?”

“Do you mean am I in a pissy mood again? Am I not going to hug whatever creepy-ass putrefying thing comes our way? Yeah, I am completely up for this,” I answered, irritated. If I got a little happy in my life, everyone assumed I was an alien pod person. How fair was that? “It’s not revenants,” I added. “Whatever it is isn’t alive. This is genuine decomposition on the move.” That was something we hadn’t run into yet, not in our lifetimes. But I was assuming if you were decomposing and still moving, a gun wouldn’t do much in the way of slowing you down. I went to the trunk and dug through my bag until I found a machete and then a second one.

“It is the mullo.” Abelia-Roo’s voice came from behind me. She and her five best had disembarked the pink pleasure palace on wheels, which had been tailing us mile for mile since the IHOP. I ignored Branje, her second, as he wasn’t worth my time, and he looked anywhere but at me. Since I’d almost cut his nose off the last time we’d met, that was the best social interaction we could hope for. And he’d thought I was human then. Now . . . he probably woke up every morning checking the bathroom mirror for that nose, praying that half-breed Auphe bastard hadn’t crawled in and cut it off during the night. If Branje hadn’t been such a dick last time, I might have felt sorry for him.

Nah.

“Mullo? Could you be more specific? Rom legend is rather divided on that subject.” As Niko was directing the question to Abelia, Delilah was stripping off her leathers to reveal nothing but skin. I wasn’t sure if wolves didn’t have the same sense of modesty as humans or if it was just Delilah. It didn’t matter. I simply enjoyed the sight.

“Don’t want leathers stained. New and pretty. Like to keep them that way.” Then she was on all fours, covered in white fur, and twice the size of any wolf in the wild. Her amber eyes were bright and her tongue lolled happily. The hunt . . . All wolves lived for the hunt, even the non-Kin ones.

“Mullo are the dead. Suyolak must have raised them. He is getting stronger at the hope of freedom or the seals are getting weaker . . . through no fault of mine.” She turned and pushed at the men. “Go. Back in the RV. This is why we pay their kind. To take care of this problem for us. This one and many potential others.” She smirked at us as she headed back with her men.

Other problems on top of the walking dead. Great. A man couldn’t enjoy his Cheetos without getting slapped in the face with dead raised by Suyolak and the hint that Suyolak could do more than that little trick and then some.

“Yes, be that as it may,” Niko said coldly to Abelia as she shuffled away, her skirts swinging, “
our
kind would appreciate a little more information. Do they suck blood as legend says?”

“You wish,” Robin complained as he climbed out of the car behind us. Salome stretched out to take the space he’d freed up, not interested in playing this time. “That would be the dhampir you are thinking of. The mullo and the dhampir have become two legends when they are but one reality. The mullo are the dead, reanimated flesh, raised by a highly annoyed healer. I’d say Suyolak is the only reason the mullo ever existed to begin with as he is the only evil healer—an antihealer, I suppose—that I know of powerful enough to do it.” He had his sword out now as well. “The dhampir are said to be the offspring of a mullo and a human, born as a large pile of flesh as slick as mucus. How decorative. Just what one wants around the apartment. In actuality, the mullo and the dhampir are one and the same—a raised corpse, the decomposing flesh of which slides off its bones. It then becomes a giant predatory and quite smelly amoeba. It covers its victim’s faces, smothers them, and then, I assume that with its task complete, goes back to rotting while Suyolak has a nice laugh.”

“Oh, you have got to be shitting me,” I said in disbelief. I’d done sewers and revenants, insane asylums and mummies, mud pits and boggles, caves and trolls. Hell, I’d even done butterfly-winged spiders that filled you full of acid and sucked out your liquified organs. But an entire graveyard full of giant decomposing amoebas that wanted to suffocate me? “At least tell me they creep along the ground at the same pace as zombies in the old movies.”

Abelia’s lips curled in a smile both satisfied and malignant. “We paid your price. Now let us see you dance for that shiny penny.” She closed the door behind her as she went into the RV.

I guessed that would be a no. Decomposing
and
fast; what a combo. I slammed the trunk shut. “We should’ve brought the flamethrower.”

“Be realistic,” Niko reasoned. “How often do we honestly need a flamethrower?”

“Two,” I said blackly. “This would make two. Two makes it a regular habit from now on. At least on road trips.” I looked down the gravel road dimly lit by the car lights. “How many dead people with flesh still on them could be there anyway? There have to be other graveyards. This can’t be the only one.” That had to cut down on bodies Suyolak could use.

Niko was already moving down the road. “Dyer, Indiana, has a population of just over thirteen thousand. I can’t imagine there are more than three cemeteries or so.” Nik and his damn memory; he couldn’t pass a sign with some mildly pertinent knowledge without committing it to a brain cell. “I wouldn’t think they have a high daily, weekly, or even monthly death toll, except for today when Suyolak went past and those corpses won’t be buried yet. As for bodies still moist and gelatinous enough to slither about in this cemetery, I suppose it all depends on how skilled the embalmer was.”

“Thanks for that,” I said, following behind him. “That didn’t make me want to barf at all.” Delilah loped ahead of us, tired of our careful pace. The path was lined with old trees, pines, looming enough to dim the car headlights further. The smell was sharp and fresh in the air.

“I’m sorry.” He wasn’t. “Does your work of fighting the rotting dead conflict with stuffing an entire bag of orange puffy chemicals down your throat in less than a minute?”

Before I had a comeback in defense of what I’d formerly believed to be the perfect food, I watched the ground erupt to one side of us. It was a man, a dead one, clawing himself out of his own grave. It was like a monster movie come to life, almost as if we were watching late-night television rather than something true and real directly before us. He kept digging until he was all the way out and swaying, his eyes and mouth stitched shut, his best Sunday suit covered with large stains of decay and rot.

Abelia had insinuated they were fast, but this one wasn’t. We could’ve cut him down before he managed to make it out all the way into open air, but . . . damn . . . this was our first semizombie. Of course, it wasn’t a zombie at all, not actually, but it was something you didn’t see every day, in our dark world included, and sometimes you had to let your curiosity get the best of you. This was B-movie legend. I’d seen this a hundred times on TV and in the occasional video game when I was younger. I’d enjoyed watching a good zombie throw down then—who didn’t? I wasn’t enjoying this one, but neither was I as wary or prepared as I should’ve been. What happened next showed me that.

The thing stood for a moment, wavering, and then the flesh literally fell off its bones, which did nothing good for its already compromised suit and did even less for my stomach. The rotting flesh continued to pool around the feet, wave after wave, before finally extruding hungry, mottled-green feelers in the air. Okay,
that
. . . that was not right. The skeleton, along with some stringy ligaments and cartilage left behind, abruptly collapsed with the suit, and I lost my taste for zombie movies just like that. A shambling zombie was one thing; a running zombie was not bad either, but zombie Jell-O I could do without.

And when a mass of putrid flesh dropped from the nearest tree to race across the ground on hundreds of tendrils, wrap around me, and climb to cover my head, neck, and shoulders while we were distracted watching the other show, that cinched the no- zombie thing for good. It happened in about two seconds. Abelia was right. It was so incredibly quick that I barely saw it; I only got a flash of what it looked like. It must’ve been only fairly fresh. It was still mainly flesh colored, spotted here and there with dull green and moist gray. One closed eye slid across it as it moved. How it sensed me, I didn’t know or much have the time to care. It still smelled strongly of chemicals—embalming fluid—not that it covered the stink of rot. Rot against my nose, my mouth—everywhere; it wouldn’t have to suffocate me. I’d choke on the stench first as it pressed closer against my face, wrapping even more tightly around my head.

I dropped the machetes. It wasn’t as if I could chop my own head off to get rid of this thing. I ripped at it with my hands. If Niko was calling my name, I didn’t hear as moist pulp filled my ears. He could’ve been under attack as well. I didn’t know. I continued to rip at the hood of skin and meat over my head. My fingers slid through it with a sickening lack of leverage. How do you fight putrescent pudding from Hell? You can claw and claw and never catch hold.

It wasn’t coming off. Jesus, it wasn’t coming off. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t get it off and I couldn’t breathe.

But I could leave.

I pushed out blindly, because if he could be there, he would be there. I pushed once and hit nothing; twice and struck a hard form. Niko. I knew he’d be doing what he could if he could shake off any attackers of his own. I shoved again and let myself fall backward away from him at the same time to give myself space and not take part of him. I didn’t want to take a Nik fingertip, thumb, or entire hand through with me when I went. That wouldn’t be good—not good at all. As I fell, I made the gate around me, something that clung to my skin this time that I welcomed.