Chapter Nine #3
None of them managed to work up the courage to actually try and stop them.
Hill staggered along behind Hen as they cut through the narrow galley kitchen at the back of the store.
It smelled of sour milk and even more sour water.
A mop stood in a pail of stagnant-foul water by the back door.
Hen shoved Hill out into the alley and then—in a flash of petty that showed she was still his Aunt Hen no matter who she remembered—kicked the pail over to flood the kitchen.
“What’s going on?” Hill asked again. “You said the Hounds would move that beggar on soon enough. What made you think they’re here for me instead?”
Hen rolled her eyes at him. “They don’t send a Hunt to roust some unaffiliated beggar,” she said. “You’re important enough to try and help, my little roadblock? You’re important enough to someone else to hurt. Now come on.”
She gave his arm a yank hard enough to make his shoulder hurt to get him moving. Hill didn’t have any satisfactory answers, but he could hear the sound of breaking wood and yelling out on the street. It didn’t seem like the time to dig his heels in.
They made it two steps.
The Hound appeared at the end of the alley before they could get any farther.
He didn’t just have a mask (muzzle) on. The dog graft covered his whole head, right up to the pricked, darkly pointed ears that stuck through human curls.
When he opened his mouth it was just a dog’s growl that rolled out.
Hen took a step back. A discarded paper bag crinkled under the sharp heel of her expensively impractical shoes.
Did the dead shop?
Did they have wardrobes? Peer pressure.
Did they recycle human fashion, like they did food, or were there dead fashion designers putting together shows?
It didn’t matter, Hill howled at the inside of his brain in frustration. The clatter of inconvenient noise didn’t go away, but it dimmed enough that he could think over it.
“How bad is it?” he asked. “At the Company.”
Hen didn’t answer him. She just let go of his wrist. “The deli guy,” she said.
“I…what…do you…Are you talking about Fraser?”
Hen nodded. “I can’t remember his name, but it was the Mother’s Meat Deli.
He was just the deli guy. I don’t know what Fraser’s problem was with the guy, but there was one.
The place closed, and you’d have thought he’d closed a deal with the US government.
I don’t know if that helps, but if it comes to it? Tell the Company it did.”
The Hound pulled a short, hooked stick out of his belt as he stalked into the alley. His eyes weren’t human. That was disconcerting.
Hen stepped away from him. “What were you thinking about in the cafe when we saw the toddlers?”
Hill glanced at her and then back at the Hound. He took a step backward and then another. Part of him wanted to pretend he couldn’t answer her immediately. It felt like the “normal” thing to say.
“My dad,” he said. “I did all this for him and—”
“Yeah, whatever, I’d think about him again,” Hen said.
She reached up and ripped the muzzle off her face.
Under it was bone, the flesh neatly carved off and the skull notched to hold the muzzle in place.
She tossed it to Hill and broke into a limping, exaggerated run that ended with her throwing herself at the Hound.
He staggered at the impact and made a futile effort to shake her off the arm she’d wrapped herself around.
Hen clutched him tighter and looked up at him with that half-flayed face.
“Oh, thank God you’re here! That one…that dead man, he tried to make me go with him to the living world! I don’t understand what’s going on!”
Her voice pitched up into a wail as her knees gave way. Some instinct made the Hound grab at her with hands that were tipped with thick, black, padded claws. He snarled in frustration as she limply hung off him.
Hill looked down at the muzzle. It was just a chicken’s skull, smeared with coffee and the sticky plasm that passed for blood here. He closed his fingers around it, the ridges of the eye sockets sharp against his skin, and backed up as he scrambled for that feeling.
How do you get angry on cue? Now that he wanted to, Hill couldn’t even remember what it felt like.
Hot? Staticky?
It made him bounce his knees?
Hen’s hysterics had lost their impact. The Hound pulled her off him and shoved her into a wall. She bounced off the brickwork and caught herself. For a second, as she gathered herself, it looked like she was going to try again, but instead she gave Hill a quick apologetic shrug and ran.
“They’re in there!” she yelled, waving her arms and pointing in what—in a generous interpretation—could have been one last redirection towards the coffee shop. “One of your men has him!”
The Hound’s eyes narrowed as he glanced back that way; then his attention was back on his target. The dead man flicked the hooked stick in a brisk, wrist-loosening maneuver and then pointed it at Hill.
“Run, I hurt you. Fight, I hurt you,” he said. It didn’t sound human, or easy, the voice that scraped out of his throat. It was a snarl chopped up and clumsily stitched back into words. “What’s left?”
It wasn’t a question. It was—unintentionally—an answer.
Hill didn’t need to be angry. That was just where he ended up.
What he needed was despair. The heavy, leaden weight that dragged him down into knowing he’d spent his life—spent all the kisses he’d not gotten, the dates he’d avoided, the friends he’d not made—on revenge so empty that no one but him even knew who it was for.
Now he wouldn’t even get that because…
The world fractured into white, and a cat, tail bottle-brushed out, stared at him for a second and then ran—
…some idiot who’d taken his fursona too far…
The lid of a rusted green dumpster slammed down, and it slammed back into the wall. Sharp metal edges cracked the cheap plaster.
…thought he was funny.
The door on the car parked in front of the alley suddenly buckled.
The glossy hunter-green paint cracked, and the window shattered in.
As the alarm was jolted on, it pulled a handful of people out onto the street.
They commented uncomfortably on the chill as they tried to work out what had happened.
One man, a crucifix around his neck, crossed himself quietly.
There was no non-sequitur from Davy to break the spell this time, no weirdly comforting tentacle to lean on. Hill just had to claw his way back out on his own.
He was on his knees.
Hill stared at his hands braced in the dirt and tried to remember how they worked. They felt thick and clumsy, like he had shoved them into a pair of gloves wrong. He managed to get them to work enough to push himself upright and…
The walls of the alley were broken, rents clawed in the plaster and stucco like it was butter, and the ground under him was cracked and pitted.
Blood—and even if it was milky and viscous, he knew what it was—splattered the walls.
The sound of alarms and slow, rattled voices were drawn out and muffled by the rattling in his ears.
A dog’s skull lay on the ground in front of him, close enough to touch. Half of it anyhow, the crack where it had broken scoured smooth and the teeth blunted.
Hill reached out to touch it, but changed his mind.
He scrambled to his feet and took a step backwards. He felt something under his heel just in time not to put his weight on it and glanced down to see Hen’s chicken skull there in the dirt. It looked clean, tiny scratches worked into the bone, but it was intact.
She’d tried to help.
Hill bent down and grabbed it. He fumbled it for a second as he tried to work out where to put it. He finally just clutched it in one hand as he ventured out of the alley and down the street.
The Hounds were still there. He might have—whatever happened to that one in the alley—but the rest had just been knocked on their backs. They were already pulling themselves back together as Hill tried to work out what to do next.
One near him that Hill hadn’t noticed grabbed his foot, thick pink nails scraping his ankle, and Hill kicked out at him to get free. Despite everything, he felt a little jolt of guilt as the heel of his foot jammed into the dog’s eye. Stupid. It wasn’t a dog, but…it still felt bad.
The Hound’s hand slipped free, and Hill ran.
He didn’t know where. It just needed not to be here.