Crisped + Sere (Immemorial Year Book 2) (34 page)

He saw others, faceless strangers whose blood was on his hands. They reached for him, they shied away from him, they screamed and cursed his name, offered their forgiveness and thanks, told him he would die in this place, under hundreds of tons of steel and metal built by men from Before, when all people worried about was working that nine-to-five, paycheck to paycheck, living for the weekend to kick off their motherfucking shoes and
relax
.

“Cavalo,” Riche gasped from somewhere behind him. “
Please
.”

MasterBossLord
, Bad Dog called sharply, and did he? Did he
really
call
anything
? Because for a moment, Cavalo thought that maybe Bad Dog didn’t speak at all. That Lucas couldn’t speak at all. That it was all in his head and—

“Mutts can’t talk,” his father told him as he took another swig from an ancient flask that said
OAKLAND RAIDERS
. “You’re fucking crazy, my boy, because mutts can’t talk, Lucas can’t fucking talk, and you
lost
something, Charlie, you fucking
lost
your goddamn
mind
—”

He turned a corner, and there stood a tree in the middle of the causeway, in the middle of a dam, in the middle of a time long after Before.

He stopped.

Took a shuddering breath.

The tree-wife said, “Do you know what it felt like, Cavalo? To die? It hurt. Not the bullet. Not the way it shattered my face. No. It was the betrayal. The way you betrayed me. The way you
killed me
.”

And she leaned for him, her branches curling around him, and he opened his mouth to
scream
—

But there was nothing there.

He opened his eyes.

The walkway was empty.

The tree-wife was gone.

Jamie and Mr. Fluff were gone.

Everyone else was gone.

He didn’t know where they were.

But there was
something—

Bad Dog reached him first. He rubbed up against Cavalo’s legs.
You can’t
do
that
, he scolded.
You can’t just
do
that, MasterBossLord. What if I lost you? What if I couldn’t find you? I would be sad, and Tin Man would be sad, and he would say it was Bad Dog’s fault. You can’t
do
that to me, you can’t
—

There was
something
—

“Cavalo,” Richie said, panting behind him. He bent over, hands on his knees, struggling to catch his breath. Sweat dripped from his nose onto the floor. “What the
hell
is going on? Are you out of your fucking—”

The bees laughed at the foolish boy.
Stupid man
, they said.
Stupid child. Of
course
he’s out of his fucking
mind
.
Of course he’s fucking
—

Voices, then. From down the hallway.

Muffled. Dark.

Richie’s eyes went wide.

Bad Dog’s ears flattened on the back of his head, tail rigid, hackles rising.

It’s real this time
, Cavalo thought.

Is it?
the bees asked.
Are you sure?

Well, no. He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure about anything anymore.

He pulled Lucas’s knife from its scabbard.

He thought he heard the faint whisper of his son’s voice, saying the god from the machine had led him here. That it was up to him to do the rest.

“Keep low,” Cavalo muttered. “Keep quiet. Don’t do shit until I say. Turn the light off.”

Richie hesitated, eyes wary.

“
Richie
.”

He nodded, a bead of sweat trickling down his forehead. He switched off the lantern and they fell into semidarkness.

Cavalo crouched down near Bad Dog’s head. “Is it him?” he whispered.

Blood
, Bad Dog said.
Blood. Smells Different. Blood. Blood. Blood.

Cavalo’s grip around the knife tightened.

They needed to move. They were running out of time.

The voices down the corridor carried, but Cavalo couldn’t yet make out the words. There was a grating laugh, rough and wet. He saw no movement. No shadows. The dam creaked around them. The wall on the right was wet. The air spoke of must and mold. Cavalo could taste it on his tongue.

“Back,” he said.

Bad Dog glared up at him as he stood but followed the command and moved behind Cavalo.

Cavalo reached out and felt along the wall, splinted wrist twinging sharply. His footsteps were light and slow. There were three distinct voices now, all male. The words were still inaudible, but they began to take shape. He picked out
here
and
watch
and a string of
we can’t begin to
.

They came to a metal stairway. The left went up, the handrail hanging off the wall. The right went down, the dark seemingly darker. The corridor continued on straight ahead. Farther down, someone had painted an arrow on the wall, crude and green. Underneath, a childlike scrawl:
THIS WAY TO THE LIGHT.

He looked down the stairs.

Mr. Fluff lay at the bottom, hidden partially by shadows that flickered along his prone body.

The voices floated up the stairs.

They said:

“How much longer we gotta stay down here?”

“Shut the fuck up, Aggie. All you’ve done is bitch and moan.”

“I don’t like it here. I don’t like it here. Right? It’s not—”

“I swear to God if you don’t shut the fuck up, I’ll kill you myself.”

“Ah. Ha. Ha. Ha. Hahahahaaaaa.”

“Jesus Christ. Of course I get sent with the fucking nutjobs.”

“I’m not a nutjob! Not like Zag. All he does is sit there, rocking and laughing and—”

“You’re just as bad. You’re just as bad as him. Both of you
shut the fuck up
.”

“Ha! Ha! Haaaaaaa!”

“And
you
. What the fuck are
you
looking at?”

“He’s smiling, Dory! Why is he
smiling
?”

“You smiling at me, boy? You fucking
smiling
at me? He ain’t here, you know. Daddy. He ain’t here, and we could do anything we want to you.”

Silence.

Then, “It doesn’t have to be your mouth, boy. You have other holes.”

“We could
do
things,” Aggie said, voice rising. “We could. He couldn’t tell. I’ve never—never
been
with. Anything. Any
one
.”

“Ha ha ha ha aaaaahhhhhhh.”

“He’d like it too,” the one called Dory said, and Cavalo decided he would die first. If this is what he thought it was, if this was where the ghost from the machine had led them, then Dory would die first. He needed to be
sure
. His eyes were adjusting to the dark, and he needed to be
sure
. “Use blood or spit. Break him in. He’d like it. He’d like it. Like a little girl. Tight and warm.”

“I get a turn after you,” Aggie said. “I want to go. I need. This. They won’t. Back at home. They won’t let me
touch
.”

“That’s because your face is a rotting mess,” Dory said. “You’re fucking disgusting.”

“HA HA HA HA!”

“Shut the fuck up, Zag!”

“
HA HA HA HA HA
—”

“Aggie, don’t get so fucking close to the goddamn mute. Don’t get so—”

But that was all Cavalo needed. He moved on the word
mute
. It was foolish, he knew. Desperately so. Just because there were three voices didn’t mean there weren’t more. Didn’t mean there wasn’t an entire goddamn
army
of Dead Rabbits underneath this dam, down those stairs and waiting in the dark.

But it didn’t matter. He was
here
; Cavalo had heard the word
mute
and sank below the surface, down into the cold place underneath the waters where the bees swarmed around him, crawling out of his mouth and ears and nose, whispering their sweet assurances to him.
We love you
, they said.
We need you
, they said.

Kill them
, they said.
Kill them all.

He didn’t jump the stairs. He couldn’t take the risk of landing wrong and breaking his ankle. He was already down a hand and would be cutting it close as it was. He took each stair one step at a time, moving quickly and quietly, knowing Bad Dog was at his heels, not giving a shit about what Richie did if he was being honest with himself. As long as he stayed out of Cavalo’s way, he could dance a jig or cower in a corner for all the fucks Cavalo gave.

He was a killer now. Again. He moved with purpose.

He reached the bottom of the stairs and followed the voices, remembering Dory because
Dory
would go first,
Dory
would have that honor.

Another corridor stretched before him. He couldn’t see how far it went. It didn’t matter, though. There was low light spilling through an open doorway. The door itself opened out into the corridor, heavy and metal. There was a circular window at the top of the door, the glass broken out.

Cavalo felt Bad Dog on his heels and thought,
If there’s three, I’ll get two, and you get the other
, and Bad Dog said,
Okay, I’ll go left, and you go right, and no one will touch Smells Different
. He ignored the cold chill that ran through him when he realized he hadn’t spoken aloud and Bad Dog had responded anyway. He could worry about that later, if they survived this.

Now, Bad Dog had his orders, Richie was dancing his fucking jig, and Cavalo held Lucas’s knife in his hands, and the man named Zag was hyperventilating, his
HA HA HA
growing reedy and thin. Cavalo reached the door, sidestepped it, filled the entry.

Everything was cold and sharp.

The man named Zag, balding and missing teeth in blackened gums, had a line of spit hanging from his mouth as he bent over, laughing toward the floor, face flushed red, eyes bulging. One stuck out more than the other, yellowed and obscene, as if it was being pushed out from inside the socket, and he
laughed
.

The other two stood on the other side of the room, staring at the wall in front of them. One of them breathed heavily, chest rising up and down, shoulders shaking. Aggie. The other reached to unfasten his pants. Dory.

Lucas. Lucas was on that wall. Lucas, with his arms chained above his head, face beat to hell, left eye swollen shut, blood dribbling from his lips. He snarled silently at Dory and Aggie, his teeth stained with blood, that clever monster, that clever cannibal. He pulled on the chains hard, harder, and Cavalo thought maybe his arms would rip from their sockets. He was shirtless, the tattoos on full display, but not a single mark on his torso. Not a single bruise or cut on his arms. They’d probably been ordered to leave the tattoos unmarked. Patrick couldn’t use them if they were blemished. He couldn’t—

There was a fourth man, a Dead Rabbit built like a fucking brick shithouse. He saw Cavalo and Bad Dog first, from his perch in the far corner of the room, hidden in shadows.

He said, “Hey. Hey. Hey.”

Zag was laughing so hard he was choking.

Dory and Aggie looked over at the man in the corner, who pushed himself up from the wall.

Bad Dog went for the laughing man. Zag.

The large man took another step said, “
Hey
.”

Cavalo said, “Hey,” and kept his promise, throwing the knife end over end. The blade buried itself in Dory’s throat. Dory gagged, eyes wide, his hands coming up scrabble along the hilt, blood spraying out around his fingers.

He said, “Guh,” as Cavalo moved snake-quick, darting around the lumbering giant. The man reached for him, hands blistered and leaking like a nightmare.

Cavalo heard Zag stop laughing and start screaming as Bad Dog snarled, but Cavalo paid them no mind. The large man would follow him, and Cavalo had work to do.

The giant said, “
Hey
,” again, as if that were the only word he knew, and Cavalo almost laughed as he pulled the knife from Dory’s throat, slicing the would-be rapist’s fingers. Dory looked shocked. Surprised, even, and Cavalo remembered what Hank had said about surprises. What Deke had thought about surprises.