The Nimble Man (A Novel of the Menagerie) (30 page)

"What do you think you're doing?" she demanded in
a terse whisper.

"Helping," he said. "I wanted to help."

"Arthur told you to stay behind."

Danny had no response to that and so he said nothing. He
felt his brows knit, felt his upper lip curl into another snarl, but could not
prevent these reactions. They were instinctual. As much as he feared her, if
Ceridwen did not let go of his wrist, he thought he might try to hurt her.

His ears twitched. Voices reached them from the stairwell. Someone
was coming up from below. Ceridwen turned toward the stairs and raised her
staff, but this time it was Danny who grabbed hold of her wrist.

"No," he whispered. "We're here to learn. To
do that, we listen."

She glared at him a moment, and then she nodded. Danny moved
swiftly and silently to the nearest door. It was unlocked, and he led Ceridwen
inside. He left the door open several inches and knelt to put his eye to the
crack. The room was dark, and once more he gathered the shadows around himself,
hoping Morrigan's followers wouldn't be as perceptive as Ceridwen, hoping the
darkness would keep them from noticing him spying.

He knew Ceridwen was behind him. Even now she would be
standing above him, trying to peer into the hall. Danny could feel her there,
could feel the cold. And that was the two of them. Ice and shadows.

Together they waited, and they listened, in the cold and the
dark.

The glass was shattered in the doors of the Museum of Fine
Arts. The broad stone stairs in front of the building's grand façade were
swarming with the dead. Corpses crawled over one another, trying to get to the
doors. The red mist that enveloped the entire city churned and rolled in clouds
that obscured the horror surrounding the museum for a few seconds before
thinning once more. Flags beat the air, jutting from the brow of the building,
and banners advertising their latest exhibitions covered part of its face.

There were walking dead who were crumbling with every step,
who were clothed in tatters. Some of them had lost arms or hands, even lower
jaws, and what skin remained was parchment stretched across their cheeks or
sunken eye sockets. Muscle tore as they walked, but the magic that propelled
them was merciless. Some of them were brittle and withered.

Eve moved through the dead with her long sword like the
reaper with his scythe. Yet this was a bloodless harvest. Her blade hacked into
them with the pop and dry cracking noise of snapping kindling. Her coat flowed
around her like a toreador's cape, but she did not need any red flag to draw
their attention. The restless dead had been sent to the museum for a reason,
but presented with targets, with vibrant, alive creatures to kill, they
deviated from their mission.

She felt the blood race through her, her mind descending
into a primitive rage that often enveloped her in combat. Her mouth opened and
she howled a cry of battle that echoed out across the empty street. Her
heightened senses brought to her the scent of Clay nearby, but he and the
specter, Dr. Graves, were lost in the mist and the sea of staggering dead.

Cold fingers clutched at her jacket and snagged in her hair.
Eve spun, bringing the sword around with both hands upon its grip. This time,
however, the blade met more resistance. Some of the walkers were freshly dead,
their flesh and muscle more substantial, their bones harder. Two hands grabbed
her head and a pale, fat man in a three piece suit dipped his jaws as though he
might tear out her throat.

Eve gave a cruel, rasping laugh as she thrust her sword
point through his mid-section. With her preternatural strength she hoisted the
fat cadaver off the ground and dumped him on top of several others. A dead
woman, her face painted in the garish makeup of morticians the world over,
seemed to grin as she reached out and twisted her fingers in the fabric of Eve's
blouse, tugging at the spaghetti straps as though intent on tearing it off. Eve
hacked her hands from her wrists.

It was a perverse death dance, a black-tie event, every
corpse dressed in its Sunday best. But Eve wasn't getting anywhere. The limousine
was back at the curb and she had made some progress, but not enough. She was at
the bottom of the museum steps and cutting through the dead was taking too
long. There were just too many of them. The sword was too slow.

"Squire!" she roared into the sky, into the red
mist.

Off to her right was a statue of a man on horseback. She
heard the goblin replying even as she spotted him, emerging from the dark
shadow beneath the statue.

"What can I do ya for, darlin'?" he called.

Eve sheathed her sword. A pair of dead walkers, one only
days dead and one rattling with every step, tried to take advantage of the
moment. She lashed out at the fresh one, grabbed it by the face and yanked it
toward her. With her left hand she dug her talons into the flesh at the back of
its neck, plunged her fingers in around bone and gristle, and tore out its
spinal column. The other, the crumbling, brittle one, she shattered with a
single kick of a designer boot.

"This is taking too long!" she called to the
goblin. "I need something that's going to clear a bigger path."

Even through the mist she could see Squire grin. The goblin
slipped back beneath the statue and disappeared in the darkness there. Squire
could fight when necessary, but that was not his purpose among Conan Doyle's agents.
He drove, yes, but only because he enjoyed it. Squire was the armorer, the
weapons master. As long as there were shadows for him to pass through, Eve knew
she would never be without a weapon when she needed one.

The dead continued to grab at her but now Eve was less
concerned with fighting them. Destroying each one would take forever and was a
waste of time. Getting through them, past them, that was the priority. She felt
her rage begin to subside. Had these been living enemies, bodies humming with
fresh blood, she would have found it much more difficult to sublimate her fury
and her bloodlust.

But they were dead, hollow things.

Obstacles.

Eve tore through them, picking up one dead walker and
tossing it at the others. With a single swipe of her hand she tore the head off
of the corpse of a teenaged girl. Her gaze swept the crowding dead and she saw
a skull-faced cadaver, a man who had been extremely tall. She pulled the arms
from the withered corpse and drove it down in front of her. It fell across several
others and they scrambled to get up, to get free, to get at Eve. Planting a
boot solidly on the dead man's chest she launched herself over the heads of a
dozen of the staggering zombies.

Eve landed in the midst of another horde and began to fight
them as well. She was halfway up the stairs when she heard Squire call her
name. She turned to see him slip from the darker shadows up against the wall of
the museum.

"How about this?" Squire asked.

He raised a pump shotgun in one hand. Eve grinned and raised
her own hand and Squire threw the weapon to her. She snatched it from the air.

"I could kiss you."

"Don't flatter yourself, babe," Squire replied,
and then he was gone again, lost in shadows.

Eve turned the shotgun and aimed in the general direction of
the museum's front door.

"All right, numbskulls. Now the fun starts."

She pumped the shotgun and fired. The blast tore the torso
out of a corpse right in front of her, ripping through two others behind it,
and knocking down several others that were clustered with them in a tangle of
clawing arms and twitching legs. Tiny bits of human gristle spattered her
shirt, but at last she was beyond caring about her clothes. There were always
more shops, always something pretty to wear. But she didn't get an evening like
this very often.

Again she pumped and fired, racing forward, leaping up
stairs. She found her footing where she could, crushing bones under her boots,
darting in amongst the dead. The shotgun boomed in her hands and she neared the
top of the stairs.

Then the shells were spent, the shotgun smoking. Eve dropped
it to clatter on the stone steps and drew her sword once more. The museum doors
had been torn open and they hung off kilter in their frames.

"In," she snarled.

Clay could be anyone. He had met warriors in his long, long
life who were terrifying in every aspect. Some of them were unnaturally strong,
some large enough that ordinary men would have called them giants. Some were
like gods to the simple people who worshipped them. But he could also be anything.
A tiger. A grizzly. A snake. Even some things that had only existed in the
imagination of the Creator, things that had never walked the Earth but that He
had considered.

The dead were quicker than they looked, jerking and lunging
and clawing. But Clay did not need swiftness or skill, did not need agility to
deal with these mindless abominations. All he needed was power and an appetite
for destruction, and he had both in quantity today.

Once outside the limousine, and away from the eyes of his
comrades, he changed. There were times when he felt awkward about his nature,
about the malleability of his body. He wanted them to see him as Clay, to have
an identity in their minds, and experience had shown them that anyone who saw
his flesh run like mercury and his bones reshape often enough could lose track
of who he was.

He hated that, for there were times when the only way he
could know himself was to see how he was reflected in the eyes of others. That
was the fundamental truth of what he was.

He was
Clay
.

Now his hot breath snorted from his nostrils and he felt his
muscles ripple in his chest. Black fur stood up on the back of his neck and he
felt the crimson mist caressing the tip of each hair. He was a five hundred
pound mountain gorilla, a silverback. Clay marched forward, trampling the
walking dead beneath him, feeling their bones crushed to dust under his feet. Seconds
passed as he cleared the area around him of zombies. His massive hands closed
on the heads of the corpses. Some of their skulls shattered in his grip. Others
he tore away from their shoulders.

"Having fun, big boy?" a voice asked.

With a grunt, the massive gorilla turned and stared as a
slit appeared in the undulating darkness beside him. Like some grotesque birth,
Squire slipped through the womb of shadows and stood before him, holding out a
huge Turkish battle axe, a weapon almost as large as the goblin himself.

"Fun," Clay replied.

He snatched the axe from Squire in one enormous gorilla
hand. The goblin took two steps backward into darkness and was gone, even as
the walking corpses tried to grab at him. Clay swung it with such power that he
cleaved the heads from two of the dead and in the same blow cut a freshly dead
man completely in half, the divided portions of his corpse striking the paved
sidewalk with moist weight.

He threw back his head, free hand pounding his chest, and
let out a gorilla roar that echoed back from the enveloping mist. The dead
surrounded him and Clay began to trample them again. The axe swung out,
clearing a path, and with his free hand he slapped others down to the ground. He
reached the stairs, huge feet cracking the stone beneath him. The dead fell
before him. His progress was slow, but inexorable.

Then, with another snort of hot air, the mountain gorilla
paused. There were times when Clay transformed that he lost himself in his new
shape. It took him a second to clear his mind, to make sense of what he was
seeing.

Just ahead, the ghost of Leonard Graves walked toward him
down the stairs. The dead sensed the phantom of the dead adventurer. They could
feel Graves's presence. But they could not touch him. Their fingers, sometimes
little more than bones, snatched at the spectral form of Dr. Graves, tried to
tear his flesh, to grab hold of his clothes. But there was nothing there. It
maddened them, and some of the mindless dead seemed somewhat less mindless now,
their faces etched with a vicious frustration.

"Clay," Dr. Graves said calmly as the decaying
corpse of a woman in military uniform reached through his ghostly flesh and
grabbed hold of another of the dead.

With a shudder and a grunt, Clay twitched and transformed
back into the human form he most often wore. There was something in Graves's
tone and bearing that made him feel foolish. And now that he no longer wore the
body of an animal, he thought he knew what it was.

"There are too many to fight," Clay said.

He swung his axe, not to cut but to batter, and knocked away
three of the dead who were clutching at him.

Graves could not be touched, but his expression revealed his
frustration. Abruptly he tore his gaze from Clay and reached out to the two
zombies nearest him. His hands, pure ectoplasm, reached inside the rotting
corpses, disappearing within. Their spirits had been forcibly pulled from the
afterlife, restored to dead flesh, to rotting brains and madness. Now, with a
single tug, Dr. Graves ripped those souls back out of their bodies.

The ghosts screamed in torment, eyes wide with unspeakable
agony. But in the moment before they shimmered and dissipated like smoke on the
breeze, they gazed at Dr. Graves with profound gratitude.

"You're wasting time out here." Graves told him.

Clay frowned. "Eve?"

"Already inside," said the specter.

"Shit," Clay said, kicking a zombie in the chest
as he started toward the stairs to the museum. "It's just second nature. Something
like this happens . . . you know once they're done here these deadheads are
going to look for more populated areas. That's what they do, zombies. They
kill. I've never understood if they're hungry or just angry, but that's what
they do. It doesn't feel right, leaving them walking around."