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CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

STANDARD ZOMBIE PROTOCOL

J oe felt like he’d been walking for hours. Too long. Far too long, with no sign of Percy.

He began to wonder if the sheath was a red herring, and Percy was Molly’s true goal all along. That she’d only sent him here to distract him, while she took Percy far away, somewhere Joe would never find him. But why bother? Why didn’t she kill him when she had the chance?

Yet another turn, and up on the right of the path, a captivating, gorgeous grave came into view. It was that of a man, his full, life-sized body represented in copper, dead and laid out long with the folds of a sheet covering his legs and feet. His head lay back, lips parted from having taken his final, painful breath. An elegant and heroic figure, the green of the oxidised copper dripped like blood from the effigy of his person, down over the concrete plinth that supported him.

The darkness shifted somehow, and Joe’s eyes fell upon the black and barely visible form that lay out long atop the grave.

As though waking from a nap, Molly rolled onto her side, stuck a hand beneath her head, and sighed out, “You didn’t find him, did you?”

The knife was weighty in Joe’s hand. But what use would it be? She was right. He couldn’t kill her yet. Not in this sea of graves that he’d traversed for so long already, without any sign of his beloved.

“And I guess you don’t have the sheath, either?”

“Where is he?” The words were hollow on his lips, plainly desperate. If he’d hoped to gain an upper hand, a chance at bartering, it went with the pathetic plea in his voice.

She pushed herself up with a weary groan, sounding like someone who’d been interrupted for the dullest of reasons. Her legs dropped over the front of the statue, and she leaned back on two arms, stretching out her spine. “You’ll never find him. And you’re almost out of time.” She glanced around the overcrowded graveyard, at nothing in particular so far as he could see. “Or maybe he’s already dead. Though I probably shouldn’t tell you that.”

Joe’s grip tightened on the blade. He wondered at the way she left herself so completely exposed, but he was thankful for what he took to be her stupidity. “If he’s dead, you’re next.”

Molly laughed, but even in the thick of the unnerving interaction, it struck Joe as a sad sort of laugh, short and lacklustre. “If only you could.”

Joe edged a step closer, foot rolling from heel to toe with practised silence.

Molly paid him scant attention, searching the night sky through wisps of fog, head languid, eyes flat and glazed. “If only anyone could. I think this may be it. And it’s not much. This world of yours, four hundred years of it, and it’s still not much.”

He couldn’t kill her yet, but if he could get closer, get a hand on her, there were other ways. “You don’t think you can die?”

Her head snapped across, darkly focused, as though she’d forgotten for a moment that he was there. “I can’t. Not ever.”

She delivered it in an accusatory, disappointed, provoking sort of way. Almost a challenge. The insinuation in her tone surprised him, and he couldn’t help but ask, “Is that what you want? You want to die?”

“No.” She shook her head, just a little, her voice soft. “Yes. Yes and also no. I had a life, a long time ago, and I want that back. And I can’t have that back. Because I don’t remember it. Does that make any sort of sense to you?”

Joe, unsure, wanted her talking, so he gave a slight sound of understanding while he closed the distance.

She stared at the ground, brow contracted in thought as she explained, “I have memories of memories. I remember remembering things, you understand? Because I’ve thought about those things over and over. And when they took my head, and they hung me up… my hair fell out, strand by strand. My skin flaked off my skull. I didn’t feel it, but I knew it was happening. And I thought…” Joe froze as her eyes slid back to him. “Why was I a dead thing to them? Why did they watch it? Why did they listen to my screams, and drink their drinks, and go home to their beds? And my hair would fall on the floor. And I would scream, and my skin would flake, and they would drink. Then they would go home. And my hair would fall… It was long and black, just like Cleo’s.”

The tale of Molly’s death, the horrors of her torture and demise, the feeling of her skull in his hands, while he was surrounded by people who saw her as nothing more than an entertaining ghost story, were all still with Joe. He’d felt her history viscerally. And even in his anger, his desperation, her past conjured the same note of sorrow and sympathy in him. He said, “Cleo’s trapped in there now. In your skull. Just like you were.” It was an appeal to humanity in something that he wasn’t certain was human at all. In any form anymore. But his soul had latched onto her sadness. Her loneliness. The hurt. All the emotions that ran in parallel with his own from long ago, that he’d discovered so recently still hadn’t left him.

Joe thought he felt a common thread running between them, just for a moment, therefore he was surprised when she replied, “And why shouldn’t she be? She’s better off in there.”

A chill sank over Joe with the statement, given with clear eyes, like it was an obvious truth. “Better off like you were?”

Molly spoke indulgently, much as a mother might when explaining a simple concept that her child had failed to grasp. “She loved him, your Percy. She does love him. Adores him. And so she never told him so many things. All the things her husband did to her. A prince. So powerful. But I remember.” She raised a hand some small way into the night air, as though listening to the memories trailing on the faint breeze. “Four hundred years. And nothing changes. She’s trapped safe, or she’s trapped unsafe. But she’s always trapped.”

Joe gave the words straight from his chest. “Percy can stop it. He can do anything. He’s…”

But how useless it was to speak in the face of Molly’s coolly mocking eyes. Cleo was rich. Powerful by a normal person’s standards. And she was too scared to even tell Percy the whole truth. Who could know better than she did what lay in store for her, or for Percy, if he tried to help?

Molly seemed to read his thoughts. Her head tilted, like she was observing the black ball of guilt and shame forming in his stomach. “You have so much faith in him, don’t you?”

He lifted his head to meet her gaze. “I do.”

“It hasn’t got you far. To a graveyard in Paris. While he bleeds and dies, maybe metres away.” She leaned forward, eyes keen for his reaction. “How does that feel?”

“Why are you doing this? You want the sheath? I’ll give it to you. Percy doesn’t need to be involved. It’s coming, it’s on the way, and I’ll hand it over, no questions asked, so long as you give him back alive. He’s done you no wrong, and you must…” How Joe hated to admit it, to tap into those memories, but he felt he had little choice. “If you remember that Cleo loved him, then you must remember him. He’s good, and he’s kind, and he’s strong, and he doesn’t deserve this.”

Lifting her chin, she looked down her nose at him. “Deserve what? What is it you think I’m going to do to him?”

Perplexed, trying to figure out just exactly how mad she was, he shouted, “To die! Here, tonight, alone in this cemetery. To be taken away from me. A man who loves him. Deeply and forever. He doesn’t deserve that, any more than I do!”

“Oh, but Joe, Percy won’t remember a thing afterwards. You needn’t worry about that. He won’t remember the pain, or his death, or you. Not really. It will be a memory of a memory of a memory, and nothing more. Until one day, he’ll wonder, did any of this really happen? Were you ever real? Or were you just a daydream?”

“What?” The word came weak, eking out of his gut, his brain joining the dots before his mind would allow him to accept the horror of Percy’s fate.

“He won’t die tonight,” Molly went on. “Not forever. Just for a short, difficult time, much like I did. Only not as painful as when I did. And then I’ll fix him. Because I do remember.” Her voice was silken as that of any lover, silken as his own was so many long mornings, by Percy’s side, his arms around him, pouring out a thousand heartfelt promises of unending love and devotion. “I remember him. I remember his body. I remember his smile. I remember that Cleo wasn’t his one, any more than he was hers. But you are. You’re the one for him. His great love in this life that I’m choosing to cut short. Or, you were …”

Molly slid down from the grave, and Joe, despite himself, took a step back. She clicked Cleo’s long fingers, and her two zombie off-siders appeared out of the darkness.

“But now he’s mine. And when I reunite the sheath and the spear, when I tear this world of yours apart, he’ll still be mine. When I’ve dismantled your governments, your monarchies, your entire society, and rebuilt it all by myself, he’ll be by my side. And you’ll be gone. You, and all those like you.” Molly ran her eyes over Joe’s black cloth, from his shoes all the way up to the collar at his throat, that for the first time in his life felt like it was choking him, as he remembered he was a walking, talking vision of the Church. A symbol of the beliefs and people that had set Molly’s body on fire, strangled her, tortured her, taken her head and set it on a plaque in a pub for four hundred years.

Her voice seethed over her lips with a hatred she’d kept under wraps until that very moment. “Tell me, how does that feel , priest?”

Tareq and Waleed closed in on either side of Joe, and even as his subconscious instincts prepared his muscles to fight, the shocked words ripped out of him, “Wait, you think I’m the morally questionable half of this relationship?”

Waleed’s strong fist, recently reattached to his body, but thoroughly functional again, swung at Joe’s stomach at speed, to be blocked by his strong wrist. “I killed one guy! One! Deliberately. But he left me with no other choice.”

Tareq looped an arm around to take Joe’s neck. Joe ducked, ramming an elbow beneath his ribs, eliciting not even a breath of pain. Waleed’s arms slammed down on his shoulders from behind. He thrust his wrists across each other like a cross, slammed Waleed’s full weight against his back as he bent, and threw him over his head to the concrete.

Joe backed up, Tareq in fast pursuit.

What would Percy do?

He’d aim to kill and not think twice about it.

And that was the only way Joe was going to get to him in time.

Standard zombie protocol.

In one smooth motion, he flipped the blade, raised it high, and rammed it down. With a flash, it smashed straight through Tareq’s right eye. His head slammed back, his body followed, and he landed on the sharp corner of a grave, his shattered brains spilling out onto the ground with a squelching smack.

All the force of Waleed’s powerful form came at him, but he still had the paring knife in his arm holster. It took but the simplest twitch of Joe’s wrist to grab the thing, twist it, and drive it sideways straight through Waleed’s ear. He slowed, stumbled, then fell flat at Joe’s feet.

Molly’s voice drifted across the silent path. “I didn’t expect that from you?—”

Another knife came from his pocket and missed her by an inch. It was his last, and he ran for it, but by the time he had his hand on it, she’d slipped behind an enormous gravestone. He was quick in pursuit, but the graves were thick and many, and the dark hid her from his sight.

She showed little fear beyond a basic self-preservation instinct when she called out, seemingly from where he’d just been, “They won’t be happy now.”

They?

Blood running like ice in his veins, Joe retraced his steps towards her voice, knife at the ready, hoping to take her out, but already aware of what horror he was likely to find instead.

A sliver of moonlight sparkled on the chunks of brain that lined the pavement—glinted and shivered, as the pieces twitched, trembled, vibrated in place, then flipped, flopped, and made their way slowly but as one mass towards the half-empty cavity of Tareq’s skull.

“No,” Joe whispered. “No.” Then he spun around, searching fruitlessly for Molly, and yelled, “This isn’t a fair fight!”

But Waleed was already climbing to his feet with the uncontrolled, grotesque movements of a puppet on a string. Joe slashed again, hitting him in the stomach this time. He barely even bent. Joe raised the knife a little higher now, but that was when he felt the wet slap on his cheekbone.

He knew what it was before he dared to look. But it was look and understand or die, so he forced his head down to where a puddle of brain sat scrunching and squelching, with clear and disturbing intent.

It was the sort of sight that would hold most men in its thrall long enough for a piece of animated brain to get one good leap in. But Joe knew better, and by the time it made the foul flight, it met only his shoulder, then he was gone into the trees.

“Percy!” he screamed. “Percy? Where are you?”

No call came back for him, and he swore furiously at the enormity of the surrounding cemetery. Avenues and avenues, graves and graves, labyrinthine and surreal. Percy could be anywhere. Was he too laid out on a grave like Molly had been? Nearby? Or was he stuck in one of these tombs? Or worse?

“Percy!”

Tareq and Waleed were behind him, recovering fast. He knew it logically and intuitively. His only direct foes until they found him, that he was aware of, were pale crawlers and Molly. He hadn’t heard a growl since he touched down on consecrated ground. She was half his size, no match for him physically should he be able to get her within his grasp, he thought, so he was quite surprised when she stepped lithely from a black parting between two graves, raised a fist, and floored him with one hard punch.

The air was knocked out of him by that well-aimed jab straight to the diaphragm, and his knife clattered to the concrete. Gasping, he pushed himself up on scraped and bruised fingers, pain shooting through his legs and arms, which was doubled when merciless hands clenched tight at his biceps and wrenched him to his feet.

Joe struggled against their hold, his lungs howling for a full breath of air, as Molly fronted up to him. “He’s around here somewhere. In fact, I think he could probably hear you if you screamed just a little louder.”

Feeling the uselessness of struggling against his two zombie captors, now fully reformed just as though he’d never touched them at all, Joe let his body relax, concentrating only on getting those desperately needed breaths back into his lungs to clear his dizzy, oxygen-deprived mind.

But his mind did clear, and in record time too, with alarm that set every nerve to horrified attention when Molly said, “Boys, let’s have a cook-up.”