Chapter 18 #2
I stomp the gas. It’s hard to aim with my engine smoking blacker than the roiling storm, but I don’t need finesse, just force. I cut along the auction building, scraping so close I bash off my side-view mirror. Someone in the hive cries out a warning. Guns turn, pointed at my windshield.
But I’ve been dead for seventeen years. I’m not afraid, not now. I’m air; I’m everywhere. I am endless and inevitable. The sky breaks, thunder bawling. The windshield shatters.
Through the spanning cracks, I smile, baring too many teeth.
I call to Bas, “Brace!”
And slam through the ring of SUVs surrounding the RV, spinning out into the maelstrom of soldiers and spirits.
The airbags explode. A thick white cloud coats the inside of the jeep.
My head rings and I can’t breathe—but I don’t need to.
I toss my body sideways, hide it under the dash for as much cover as I can manage.
Jackboots shout at me to get out of the car, hands raised.
Ghosts risen from the newly fallen bodies swarm to join their fellow soldiers battering at the RV’s windows.
I can’t move, my stunned body locked behind the wheel, desperately scanning the RV for any flickering sign of life.
I strain to hear a voice, a footstep, a heartbeat, my soul biting at its seams until finally—there.
A gun barrel glints in the open slit of the RV’s driver’s-side window.
Cain. He’s still fighting. He’s alive—
A jackboot spins, taking aim. He fires, a hole blooming like a sick flower in the door of my mother’s RV—
He fires again and the ghosts of dead DNR soldiers boil anew, hissing against the metal of her RV door, working up the strength to force their way through—
The soldier fires again and I—
Scream.
The sky rips open. Lightning cracks. Hail shatters helmets harder than fist-strikes. The helicopter spins away, fleeing the storm, looming so low it rattles abandoned flea market tables. Ice crawls up the buildings and the SUVs, misting every black metal surface ashy gray.
Out in the distant fields, I feel the ley lines boil.
They thrash in the earth, swimming straight at me.
Hills heave like a sick belly, buildings shaking, gutters unhinged.
A rusted weathervane crashes down from the slope of the auction barn roof, its comically huge chicken shattering into a man and sending another two to the ground.
“It’s her!” they bellow.
“Target acquired!”
“Engage, engage!”
Before they can move, Bas heaves himself onto the roof of the jeep in one smooth motion, sneakers thundering—and he burns.
Sunlight cuts through the storm to sing into his hand.
Fire boils from his eyes, catches in his gray hair until he stands in a living cloud of light.
Gun barrels swing up, acquiring a new and pressing target.
Bas explodes forward, charging into the frost-chucked dirt, scything his way through with a heavy blade of light.
Bodies crumple, silent in the maelstrom, folding to the ground like wheat.
The screams change.
“Secondary target!”
“Unnatural combatant engaged!”
“Fall back, fall back!”
A nice sentiment, but too late. The only place to fall back—the only place away from our unrelenting onslaught as patient and furious as an incoming tidal wave—is the RV tossing in a seething sea of ghosts.
And all ghosts belong to me.
Stepping out of the jeep without my meat, I stride into the middle of the battle, swelling with every step, tall enough to eat the world.
The ghosts fall away from their rage and desperation.
They look up at me, mouths gaping, and not for the first time, I wonder what they see.
What do I look like to them? What do I sound like that the earth shook at my open mouth, that the sky broke and the ley lines fought themselves awake?
Bas blurs around me, harvesting, and I stare at the awful fruits of his labor—newly blossomed, bright-burning flowers in the dead and shriveled grass.
Look at them: they still remember themselves so clearly, down to the littlest detail. These cruel and complicit thugs, these world breakers, damned a million peaceful souls to suffer and meanwhile here they are, staggering to their feet when they should kneel to me. When they should weep and beg.
And yet, instead—this one remembers how many bullets he has left in his gun. That one, the exact weight and scuff of his boots. They all remember the badge on their breasts—that wicked upside-down caduceus, drooling asps with fangs bared.
God, they must have been so proud, to have built their entire lives and selves around the DNR that they still remember it now—when aching strays lost in the gutters can’t even remember their own faces—and this is what they did with that life?
Caused more suffering? Broke the world worse?
Tried to hunt me down to finish their warped little science experiment—is this what they wanted?
Am I everything you hoped? Are you so fucking proud of yourselves, dead in this cursed dirt, my mother’s RV with windows shattered and blood along the frame—
Wait—blood?
“Cain!” I scream.
The ground quakes but no ghost by that name answers me. Small favors.
Trapped between the pressure of my weight on the world and their own training, the DNR ghosts don’t know what to do. Trembling, every finger memorized, one walks forward. He stares me down, lifts his gun, and fires.
But guns have no soul. He holds a useless memory in his hand, only the residue of his own hatred, and I stare at him, watching him uselessly fire, fire, fire with a storm raging in my oceanic chest and I…
Let go.
I swell. I grow. Taller than Bas, than a funeral pyre, than a graveyard angel with stony hands outstretched. I reach down and gather them, every wretched spark, my fingers spread in two hateful stars.
And some distant part of me, some little regret still mired in my meat, screams at me to stop.
Some lingering human remnant, teenaged and small and scared, begs me to show mercy.
The same girl who cringed in high school hallways, six schools in three years.
The same girl who spent her time lingering on weird fringes of the internet, reading about reincarnation and spells for invisibility—craving, so badly, simply to cease.
The same girl they hunted down howls at me to stop, to think.
I’m too big, my weight on the world too massive; if I touch a ghost in violence, I will end it.
But the windows are all spiderwebbed in my mother’s RV and blood drips down its frame.
I bring my palms together.
All the little lights snuff out.