his position, Kane could see only the figure’s boots—holed and wasting away. He felt his stomach turn as the dead thing made some hideous sound from the back of his throat, the noise of a man choking on his own blood.
Across the room, crouching among the stacked crates, Grant and Brigid watched furtively as Kane huddled closer to the wall, trying to keep out of the eye line of the dead thing standing in the doorway. They heard him make that terrible sound deep in his throat, and they watched with concern as three figures seemed to answer, moving toward him from their work at a stack of matériel near the glass office. Ungainly but purposeful, the figures made their way over to the area where Kane was crouching, one of them using an ebony walking cane to help balance the stride of his wasted legs.
Grant tapped on his Commtact. “Kane, you’ve been spotted,” he whispered. “Abort.”
Even as Kane heard Grant’s words amplified through his mastoid bone over the subdermal Commtact, the eye-patched figure at the doorway turned to face him, showing the fearsome remains of its broken teeth as it snarled at him. Kane’s eyes widened as three more rotting forms joined Eye Patch, standing in a semicircle at his back. As Kane began to push himself up from the wall, the figure with the eye patch raised his sickening, rotted hand and his bony index finger extended to point at the ex-Mag, like the accusing finger of judgment.
“Guess you’ve got me dead to rights,” Kane muttered as he stood in front of the four accusing, wasted figures.
Chapter 5
Kane took in the figures who faced him in an instant.
The one with the eye patch pointed at Kane with a skeletal index finger as if in accusation of the living.
Behind Eye Patch, three other forms loomed, rocking on their heels as they watched him with dead eyes. The one farthest to the left was tall and scarecrow thin, wearing tattered clothing. He was so unsteady that he used a crooked walking stick.
Beside Walking Stick, Kane saw an emaciated figure with the straggly remains of long dreadlocks. The wide hips of her pelvis confirmed that she had been a woman, and a powerfully built one at that. When the woman bunched her fists, a gob of discolored and rotting flesh hung down between her ragged fingers like a teardrop. Mentally, Kane tagged the woman Dreadlocks before turning his attention to the last of the undead creatures.
This one was shorter than the others, a little over five feet tall, and had adopted a fighting stance, pitching his legs wide to lower his center of gravity. He had wispy hair, and his skull peeked through the rotted flesh of his long-dead face. Kane tagged this one Shorty, and figured him to be the least trouble if it came to a fight.
Pointing at Kane, Eye Patch curled an index finger, folding it inward, like the beckoning finger of fate. A twisting knot in his stomach, Kane recognized the movement; the corpse wasn’t pointing but was pulling the trigger of a gun, an old flinch reaction from whatever brutal life he had lived.
As the realization dawned, Kane took a quick step to his left, away from the glass wall. The tall corpse with the walking stick took a step to his right, holding the stick out to block the ex-Mag’s way. Behind the clutch of corpses, the twisted form of Ezili Coeur Noir had appeared, moving like a specter from the glass-fronted office into the main hangar. Her mouth opened, black tongue writhing amid rotting gums, as she spoke.
“Life.”
Kane heard the word, and felt the nagging at the back of his mind that somehow he knew this woman. The eye-patch-wearing corpse took another step toward Kane, so close now that Kane had to step back to avoid him. The corpse’s dead companions stepped forward, too, boxing Kane in. Behind them, more of the undead figures had begun amassing, acknowledging the perverted condemnation of the queen of death.
Taking another lurching step forward, the figure with the eye patch reached for Kane once more, and Kane found himself backed up against the wall.
“Back off, Eye Patch,” Kane snarled.
The corpse ignored him, reaching up with his rotting left hand and grabbing a fistful of Kane’s jacket. The instant the corpse grabbed him, Kane rammed his Sin Eater into the corpse’s belly and squeezed the trigger. Gobs of desiccated flesh spurted from the figure’s back as 9 mm bullets blasted through rotted flesh. The corpse staggered backward several steps, wrenching a square from Kane’s jacket, two brass buttons flying off into the glass wall to Kane’s right.
Freed of the corpse-thing’s grip, Kane kicked out with his left leg, striking the tall man in the midsection. Eye Patch bent over himself with the impact of Kane’s kick, and the ex-Magistrate pushed off, flipping over the toppling body and bringing his gun up to deal with the next of the clutch of zombies.
A short way across the hangar, Grant spoke to Brigid where they hid, watching the frantic showdown from the cover of the stacked crates. It had been less than ten seconds since Grant’s Commtact warning, and it was clear Kane was in trouble.
“Come on,” Grant snapped.
Brigid trotted out from cover in Grant’s wake, blasting bursts of bullets from her TP-9 at the looming pack of undead creatures that traipsed across the room toward their partner.
A fleshless woman standing close to the crates staggered over as Grant drilled her with bullets from his Sin Eater, flipping the weapon around to smash her in the face with its grip. Brigid leaped over the woman’s corpse as it flopped to the floor.
And then, the one thing Brigid had most feared happened. As she leaped the fallen figure of the corpse, a skeletal hand whipped out and grabbed her ankle, pulling her to the ground.
Brigid spun, unleashing another burst of bullets right into the undead thing’s withered face at near point-blank range. The corpse woman shook in place as Brigid’s bullets drilled into her, ripping away the gory stump of her nose and rattling against the empty sockets of her eyes. Yet still the undead thing clung on, ignoring the effects the bullets were having on her face, and Brigid reached a sudden, awful realization—bullets weren’t stopping these things.
A little way across the hangar, Kane had just come to the same conclusion. Still in motion, he had blasted a volley of 9 mm steeljackets at the scarecrowlike figure holding the walking stick, only to see him stumble a pace back before regaining his footing, glowering at Kane with those lifeless eye sockets. Kane spun, dropping low as his leg swept the scarecrow, knocking him from his feet. The corpse’s walking stick whipped out as he fell with a ghastly hiss from peeled-back lips as black as night.
Kane continued the leg sweep, catching the woman with dreadlocks just behind her ankle. She stumbled a pace forward, but despite her apparent unsteadiness, she refused to fall. She turned on Kane then, reaching down at him with long arms as he scooted across the metal plating of the floor. Kane grunted as the woman’s hands snagged the torn front of his jacket, and she demonstrated incredible strength as she pulled him from the decking in one swift jerk.
The hideous figure of Ezili Coeur Noir let loose a deep, throaty laugh as Kane was yanked from the floor, nodding her approval as he was thrust up in the air by her dead servant. With clawlike, fleshless hands, Dreadlocks lifted Kane high over her head as her mistress laughed, and Kane tried desperately to bring his pistol up to shoot her.
Just then a stream of bullets slammed into the woman holding Kane and she stumbled back, her dreadlocks whipping around her face. Kane felt her grip loosen, and suddenly he was hurtling through the air before crashing an instant later into—and through—the glass wall of the office. Kane rolled across the office as glass
