Skeleton Crew (24 page)

He might have been dead, but Wale wasn't stupid. Without lowering his magical defenses against my onslaught, he dropped his levitation spell and triggered a jump talisman as soon as his feet hit the pavement. He flipped up and back onto the edge of the freeway overpass, teetering precariously for a moment. “A great flame follows a little spark!” I shouted, and my fireball streaked out and exploded into the side of the bridge. Wale leaped away just ahead of the spell and raced out of sight across the overpass. He moved pretty well for a zombie.

I pushed my levitation spell higher and slowly rose to the overpass. I dropped down on the roof of a U-Haul trailer and looked around. Wale was nowhere to be seen. “It is natural to give a clear view of the world after accepting that it must be clear,” I said, and threw my eye-in-the-sky spell into the air. I sent it racing up about a hundred feet
and panned around. Wale was heading west on the freeway, running and leaping along the line of gridlocked cars. He was heading away from the club, but no way was I letting him go.

“The kids are safe,” Adan called inside my head. “Open a gate.”

I almost laughed out loud. “Meep-meep,” I said, and spun my Road Runner spell. I leaped from the trailer over a couple cars onto the hood of an SUV, and then I was off, racing after Simeon Wale across the stalled traffic that stretched before me like stepping stones in a pond.

Adan called again. “Domino, bring me in.” This time I did laugh aloud. “Can't,” I answered. “Chasing.”

“Chasing? Domino, he could be leading you into a trap.”

I didn't think Wale had thought that far ahead, but it wouldn't have changed my mind, anyway. I was high as a hippie at a Grateful Dead show, and I just wanted to run, and jump and rain lethal magic down on Simeon Wale's head until he was burned to a cinder.

We reached the Central Avenue exit by the time I ran him down. I jumped from a FedEx truck to the top of the exit sign and saw him streaking down the ramp below me. “Vi Victa Vis,” I said, and the force spell knocked him off the ramp and down onto the Sixteenth Street feeder. He pulled himself off the pavement and turned to face me long enough to fire back with an attack spell of his own. I caught it with countermagic and snuffed it out before it even had a chance to form, and then I hit him with another force spell that knocked him across the feeder into a metal fence that topped the low brick wall fronting the street. A section of the fence went down and Wale tumbled through into a small private parking lot.

He tried to drag himself back to his feet, but I guessed enough of Wale's corpse was broken that even magic couldn't move it anymore. He struggled for a few seconds, and then collapsed facedown on the pavement. I jumped over the twisted fence and landed beside him. I nudged him with the toe of my boot and rolled him onto his back. He stared up at me with dead, gray eyes.

“Suicide by gangster,” he said, and his laughter was dry and ragged.

“You might have mentioned that's all you needed from me. It would have wasted a lot less of my time.”

“Wanted to know if I was better than you.”

I shrugged. “You're not,” I said. “You never were.” I spun my ghost-binding spell and finished the job.

The ivy covering the beige, synthetic stucco walls of the Men's Room looked as natural as double-Ds on a hundred-pound stripper. Fortunately, the vines didn't crawl up to the second story, and the glowing, red-and-silver tag that spelled out the word SANCTUARY was easily visible against the prefabricated drabness. We had muscle in the parking lot and on the roof of the club—it squatted in the shadow of the freeway and that was an obvious angle of attack if any zombies up there got the idea to do a little one-stop grocery shopping.

Inside, the Men's Room was packed to the lap-dance couches with civilians. I hadn't seen so many people in the club since a celebrity porn star wiggled through on a special appearance tour. I'd been worried about the mental state of our wards based on what Chavez had said. The juice we were pumping into the club would have been enough to give them a case of the crazies, even without a zombie apocalypse to adjust to. So I was surprised when I walked in the front door and found a fairly respectable party going on.

Chavez had both bars humming like an assembly line.
I glanced up at the ticker running over the main bar and quickly saw why—it was advertising free drinks all night. The sound system was cranked up to Armageddon and the stages were crowded ass-to-elbow with naked dancers. Judging by the standards of physical fitness and dancing prowess on display, none of them were professionals.

Adan pushed through the crowd and took my elbow. “You were supposed to gate me back in,” he said, leaning in and shouting in my ear.

“Didn't really have the time,” I said. “Where are the boys?”

Adan blushed. “I took them back to the dressing room. Some of the girls are looking after them.”

I drew my head back and looked at him. “Are you shy, Adan? They're just dancers. They're working their way through college.”

“I'm not shy,” he said. “It's just…not a lot of experience with human women. It's different, somehow.”

“Just remember, the club is a lot like the Seelie Court. You got to be able to dance, lie and fight. Well, most of the girls can't fight for shit.”

Adan grinned. “Let's go see Chavez.” We walked to the back of the club and up the stairs to the office. Chavez had Rashan's parchment map of Greater Los Angeles spread out on the desk, the corners weighted down with cell phones. Two dancers stood beside him holding cells in both hands, ready to speed dial or slap a phone against his ear if he got an important call.

“There's got to be a better way, Chavez,” I said. “You could get one of those headsets. This is embarrassing—it's like a guy buys a car and then hitches it to his plow horse. No offense, ladies.”

“Chola,”
he said, glancing up at me, “we got a major
concentration of Zeds moving south out of downtown.”

There were red dots scattered all over the three-dimensional profile of the city superimposed on the parchment.

The clump of dots at Santa Fe and Fourth Street was so large and densely packed it looked like Chavez had gotten a nosebleed.

I nodded at the map. “The bean-sidhe are feeding you the locations?”

“Yeah, we got 'em hooked right into the map. We're getting updates in real time.”

“Okay, then just send some big hitters over there to clean it up. Where's Amy Chen's crew?”

“She's over in Leimert Park, D. Fucking gentrification, we don't have the juice boxes there we used to. The civilians are holed up in their churches, and Zed's hitting them like fucking Oki Dog after last call.”

“Where are Jack and Honey?”

“With Ismail Akeem in Koreatown. The real problem is we got a Stag platoon down there.”

“Why is that a problem? Where are they?”

Chavez reached down and pulled the three-dimensional image toward him, zooming in on the intersection. There was a tiny clump of blue dots surrounded by all the red ones.

Chavez pointed to an old brick building with green freight doors. “They're pinned down in the produce warehouse.

They were trying to pull some civilians out of the lofts across the street when Zed overran them. They lost a couple guys, but they were able to pull back in time. Lowell's leading them and he doesn't want to call in reinforcements.”

Looking at all the red dots surrounding his position, I couldn't really blame him. “They can't shoot their way out?”

“There's less than thirty of them,
chola,
and at least five hundred Zeds outside.”

Guess not. “What about the sidhe?”

Chavez snorted. “Oberon is mostly staying in Hollywood and the turf you gave up in South Central. Says his people can't hack it out in the cold. Anyway, it's good because he's taking care of business on his streets.”

I nodded. The fairy king had told me what I could expect. “Where's Mr. Clean?”

“That scary motherfucker is everywhere, but he ain't exactly checking in.”

“Okay, Adan and I can go pull the government out of the fire. How's everything else look?”

Chavez opened his mouth to speak and then spread his arms over the map. “Hell if I know,
chola.
Maybe better than it was a few hours ago but still not too fucking good? It's like you said—it's a numbers game and I always copied off you in math class.”

“Fuck that, Chavez, we both copied off your girlfriend.”

“Oh, yeah.” His eyes drifted away and a little smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “What was her name,
chola?
”

“
Their
name was Maria.”

“That's right.
Las Tres Marias.
They were good at math.”

“So you're telling me you don't know if we're winning.”

“I'm telling you I don't even know
when
I'll know. When there's no more red dots on the map, I guess. It goes like this for a while and you think you're getting ahead of it, and then a Zed pack gets inside an apartment building or a hotel or something, and if we don't get there fast enough the map starts lighting up again.”

“We're doing everything we can, Domino,” Adan said. “It'll have to be enough.”

“Or it won't,” I said.

“It will. Are you ready to go?”

“Give me a few minutes. Mr. Clean makes me nervous and I won't have a chance to check on him if I don't do it now.”

Adan nodded. “I'll go look in on the kids.”

A little tinge of jealousy snuck up on me from behind and squeezed my cheeks. I turned away, walking over to the leather couch and collapsing on the soft cushions. “You need some singles?” I said, digging in the front pocket of my jeans. Adan stared at me blankly. “For the dancers…you put a dollar in their…never mind, country boy.”

“I'm not going for a dance, Domino,” Adan said.

Chavez looked back and forth between us, grinning. “It's a strip club,
chola.
It doesn't cost anything to look.”

“Fuck you, Chavez. Go, Adan.” I waved him away and closed my eyes. Sarcasm and snark can be deadly weapons, but when they misfire they can really make you look like a clown—the goofy variety, not the scary ones. I didn't even care if Adan wanted to take another peek at the dressing room. I might have worried about him if he didn't. Why did I have to say something? Why couldn't I have said something that was actually funny? Why did fucking Chavez have to hear it?

I took a deep breath and beat the moment of schoolgirl awkwardness back into the closet. Then I conjured an image of Mr. Clean in my mind, tapped the abundant juice pulsing through the club and spun my peekaboo spell. “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle,” I said.

At first I thought my spell had failed. The image that sprang up behind my closed eyelids was a gray, color-streaked frenzy of motion-blurred chaos. Then the image froze, instantly, and I found myself looking down at an
expansive pile of headless zombies. A massive scimitar of silvered steel extended into my view and dripped crimson from the razor-sharp edge.

“Get out of my head,” said Mr. Clean. “You know I hate that.”

“Yeah,” I said, smiling. “Anyway, technically, you don't really have a head. You're a spirit.”

“I do have a head, as I am at present manifest in the physical world, and indeed you demonstrate that my head possesses within it far more productive material than does yours.”

“That was a hell of a sentence, Mr. Clean. You might need to diagram that motherfucker for me.”

The jinn's sigh murmured in my mind. “What do you want, Dominica? As you can see, I'm busy. I was about to set upon a strip mall where the dead are, as we speak, causing great distress to the locals.”

“Well, I'll let you set upon it in a second. Seriously, what's with all the verbosity? Are you feeling okay?”

“The carnage is invigorating,” said Mr. Clean. “I am lifted on wings of slaughter and soar on the hot, red currents of sublime and exquisite war.”

“If you're having such a good time, maybe we can renegotiate the price.”

“Not a chance.”

“Didn't think so. Where are you?”

Mr. Clean laughed. “Where is the hatred in a man's heart? Where is the plague that steals silent and unseen through the village streets while the children lie dying in their beds? Where is the—”

“What's the fucking address, Mr. Clean?”

“I'm in Northridge.”

“War is hell,” I said. I had the jinn working the Valley
because he could move faster than my gangsters and the juice was probably thin enough out there to give the sidhe respiratory problems. Mr. Clean could cover more ground than anyone else I had on my side of the zombie apocalypse. “What are you doing with the heads?” We hadn't really gotten into the details, and I'd been worried about it since we closed the deal. I did
not
want to go home to a condo full of zombie heads.

“As you did not specify a location for proper disposal, I am leaving them where they fall.” I saw the scimitar point down to the pavement where one of the zombie heads lay on its right cheek. It stared up at me—at Mr. Clean—out of the corner of one filmy, gray eye. It snarled and gnashed its teeth.

“I hope the Xolos are quick about cleaning up the mess. That's going to be hard to pass off as LSD in the water supply.”

“Even if you had directed me to dispose of the heads properly, the bodies remain animated, as well.” The jinn reached down with the scimitar and poked at one of the decapitated bodies. Its arms lashed out and the thing grabbed onto the sword, dragging its hands along the blade. Mr. Clean wrenched the scimitar free and the hands grasped blindly for a moment before withdrawing.

“Yeah, don't do that,” I said. “I just want you to bring me one head—leave the rest of them alone.”

“Which head would you like?”

“The last one.”

 

Adan and I zigzagged our way over to Mateo and headed north up the narrow street lined with body shops, warehouses and distribution centers. Taggers had put down most of what passed for paint jobs on the concrete and brick that
crowded us on either side. If anything, the street was even more choked with abandoned vehicles than Alameda and the freeway had been. There were a lot fewer cars, but a lot less space to cram them in. We moved quickly, running and leaping along the metal highway, occasionally pausing to liberate a dead motorist that hadn't yet turned and gone hunting. Most of them were so badly mauled I wasn't sure they'd be mobile even when they went Zed. We didn't spot a single zombie up and about.

At Seventh Street, the sprawling warehouse district began to give way to stores, bars, restaurants and the occasional loft or apartment building. We saw shattered windows and splintered doorways, and the businesses were empty and silent.

When we crossed Sixth Street, we heard the noise. It didn't sound a whole lot different from the obscene choir I'd heard when the zombie horde attacked us on Alameda, except this time it was punctuated by staccato bursts of gunfire. Adan and I stopped on the hood of a greenish-gold Chevy beater and looked at each other.

“How do you want to do this?” Adan asked.

“I figured we'd walk up and you'd throw down that blast spell. Worked pretty good last time. It ought to buy us enough time for Lowell and his guys to get out.”

“Listen to the gunfire.”

I did. “Automatics…some small-caliber stuff.” Then it registered. “Aw, shit, some of the zombies are carrying.”

“Yeah, you have to think the automatic fire is coming from the soldiers. The rest of it, though—that's got to be zombies.”

“Who are you and what did you do with the country boy?”

Adan laughed. “I'm a quick study. This could get com
plicated if the zombies have guns. Even if they didn't, you had it about right—we'd basically have to walk right into the middle of them for me to use that spell. Maybe we should try to think of a smarter plan.”

I nodded. “Let's move in a little closer and scout it out.” When we crossed Palmetto, we could see the loft building that had been the soldiers' objective up ahead. The produce warehouse was still out of sight. The noise had grown to a dull, persistent roar and the sharp bursts of gunfire followed one after the other. I'd been around gunfire plenty of times, even automatic weapons fire, but it hadn't sounded anything like this. I might have called myself a soldier, but I'd never been in a war zone.

I flipped my head up at a large, white stucco warehouse and we levitated to the roof. We moved carefully and quietly to the edge and looked out at the vast horde of zombies that surrounded the produce warehouse across the street.

There were a hell of a lot more than five hundred of them.

Either the bean-sidhe were wrong, or Chavez's map was wrong, or the dead had gotten some reinforcements of their own.

“The Zed Sea,” said Adan.