Skeleton Crew

I peered at Pearl with my witch sight. What little juice she’d had when she was alive was settling in her tissues like lividity and just beginning to ooze from her skin. She stared back at me, her eyes wide and glassy. Pearl was dead as disco but she obviously hadn’t noticed it yet.

“Let’s just do what we have to do and get out of here, Domino,” Adan said. “No point in having a conversation about it.”

“Henry and Pearl are zombies, Adan,” I said.

“Well, I never!” Pearl protested. “I’m Presbyterian, young lady.”

“Yeah, so we have to put them down,” Adan said.

“We’re talking to a couple of zombies.”

“What’s your point?”

“Braaaiiins,” Henry said, giggling. He slid his broken body off the trunk and staggered to his feet.

“Let’s say your home computer wasn’t working, and you needed to figure out what was wrong with it. What would you do?”

“I don’t have a computer,” Adan said.

“Damn, you’re country.”

“I grew up in Faerie.”

“If you had a computer and it wasn’t working, you could run a diagnostic program…okay, skip the analogy. The point is, we need to figure out what’s causing the zombie outbreak. Here we happen to have a couple zombies. We could ask them.”

“That’s the worst analogy I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s not my strong point,” I allowed.

“You already talked to Terrence’s nephews. One of them, anyway. You said he really didn’t know anything. Pearl here doesn’t even know she’s dead.”

“I am not dead!” Pearl said.

“See?” Adan said.

“I never finished talking to Tony, because Pac-Man ate him. Plus, no disrespect to the mostly dead, but Tony wasn’t that bright. Pearl might have better answers.”

“What about Henry?”

“What about him?”

“He’s stepping up on you.” Adan nodded his head, looking over my shoulder.

I jumped, turning, and sure enough Henry was creeping up on me from behind, his arms outstretched and his hands grasping spasmodically. His eyes shone with madness and wickedness, though I had the feeling the wickedness, at least, had probably been there even before he died.

“Vi Victa Vis!” I yelled, and the force spell hurled him back and slammed him into the Lincoln’s rear suicide door. His already abused skull made a pulpy sound when it struck steel, and he slumped to the ground, moaning.

I pulled juice from the streets—I was on my home turf now and it came easily. “At first cock-crow the ghosts must go back to their quiet graves below,” I said. The magic burned through Henry’s ravaged body and wrenched his spirit free of the flesh. The corpse toppled over and lay still on the sidewalk.

Pearl screamed and rushed to Henry’s body. She dropped to her knees on the concrete hard enough to tear skin, but it didn’t seem to bother her. She cradled him in her arms and sobbed, and then she jerked her head around to look at me. There were no tears but there was genuine hate in her eyes. “What did you do,” she snarled.

Jesus Christ. “He was dead, Pearl,” I said. “I just ended his suffering.”

“You killed him!” she wailed.

“No, Pearl. He was already dead, remember? You told me that. You also told me he tried to eat you. I had the idea you hated his guts.”

“He was my husband. For fifty-seven years. Of course I hated him! But he was the love of my life. He gave me three beautiful children. Oh, God, how I loved him when we were young. He was so handsome and strong…all of my friends were jealous and I was so proud. He was a good man. What am I supposed to do now?” Pearl buried her face in Henry’s chest and sobbed uncontrollably.

You’re supposed to get hungry and start eating people, I thought. “I have to ask you some questions about what happened, Pearl,” I said. “This is going down all over the city and it’s wrong. You see that, don’t you?”

Pearl lifted her head and nodded. She sniffled and dabbed at her eyes with wrinkled hands. “How can you stop it? Are you a pastor or something? I don’t hold with women pastors.”

“Not a pastor, Pearl, but something like it. Will you answer my questions?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Tell me what happened after Henry died.”

“I already told you—I didn’t feel well, so I went to lie down for a while. It was just too much, finally, do you understand? I just couldn’t deal with it all right then.”

“I understand, Pearl. But tell me more about what you felt. Did you notice anything unusual?”

“It was my heart,” she said. “It’s always my heart. I had chest pains, dizziness. Maybe it was a little worse than usual. I took one of my pills but it didn’t seem to help. I felt worse, so I went to lie down on the bed for a while. And like I said, I must have dozed off because the next thing I remember is waking up.”

“How did you feel when you woke up?”

“Strange, I suppose. Nothing I could put my finger on that felt wrong…just, nothing felt quite right. You get used to the way your body feels—you even get used to your pain, when you’re my age. It just felt off, like it wasn’t the body I was used to. Was Henry right? Am I dead, too?”

“Yes,” I said. I couldn’t think of a good lie, or any reason to use one on her if I could.

“Why hasn’t the Lord called me home? I’m ready to go.”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Tell me anything else you remember.”

“I felt alone,” Pearl whispered. “I thought it was just because of Henry dying, but now I don’t think so. It felt like…waiting.”

“Do you know what you were waiting for, Pearl?”

“No, it’s not like that.” Pearl shook her head and thought for a moment. “I was born during the Great Depression,” she said finally. “We came out here from Oklahoma when I was a little girl, and my father worked in the orchards and the fields. He’d be gone for weeks at a time, and sometimes we didn’t know when he’d come back. When I was a little older, he enlisted and went away to the war. That was even worse—we didn’t know if he’d come back at all. I know what it feels like to wait for someone, honey. This feeling wasn’t the same. With Daddy, the feeling was always about him. I was waiting for him. This time…it was just an absence and a sense of expectation that hung there in the room, thick enough to breathe. I was just waiting.”

I glanced at Adan and he shrugged. I turned back to Pearl. “Is there anything else you can tell me? How are you feeling now?”

“I hurt. Everything feels…tight. Inside. Like cramps, but sharp and hot.” She started crying again and covered her curler-studded hair with her arms. “I’m hungry. Oh, God, I’m so hungry, and I know what I want. I know what I want and I can’t bear it!” She began rocking herself and clawing at her head, pulling out fistfuls of fine, white hair and blue curlers.

“Domino…” Adan warned.

“You won’t have to wait much longer, Pearl. I promise. It’ll just be a little while and then you can go home.” I knelt down and touched her wrinkled face, tilting it up to me. I smiled at her, putting as much warmth in it as I could find, and then I spun the spell and pulled her spirit free. I laid her body down beside Henry’s as gently as I could.

“We need to get out of here,” Adan said.

I stood there looking down at Pearl’s body. “I know, but we can’t just leave them here like this.”

“Let’s get moving,” he said. “I’ll call 911. I do have a cell phone,” he added, smiling.

I nodded and whistled to the piskies, who were still flying air patrol over the crowd. We all piled into the Lincoln. I reached for the ignition and then slumped back in my seat. “It’s never like this in the movies.”

“What’s that?” Adan asked.

“This shit is cruel, man. Dying’s got to be bad enough, but this is just brutal. It’s just wrong. I don’t care if it’s God Himself fucking with us—I’m going to find out who’s responsible, and I’m going to break off a foot in his ass.”

five

When we got back to my condo, Honey took Jack in to meet her family. They seemed to be moving pretty fast, but I wasn’t exactly qualified to offer relationship advice. The last time I’d gotten involved the man of my dreams turned out to be a shapeshifter who wanted to skin me and steal my magic. Honey couldn’t do much worse than I had with Adan’s changeling. And Jack seemed okay—the strong, silent type, as piskies went.

“What?” Adan said.

“What, what?”

“You were staring at me.”

Damn. “I was just thinking about, uh, where to start.” I gestured vaguely at the living room. “Have a seat.” I went into my bedroom and came back with my laptop. I pushed the Chinese checkers board out of the way and put the computer on the coffee table.

“Domino, I told you, I’m not really into gadgets.”

“Gadgets? It’s a computer, Adan. And I use it for divination magic.”

“Why? You could just use—”

“Skip it, Adan. Okay, we do the summoning ritual first, just so we can get it off our plate and deal with the zombie problem.”

“You want to identify the ritual,” Adan said, and I nodded. “Okay, what can I do to help?”

“Let’s see what I get. Then you can help me think it through.” I brought up Wikipedia on the browser and tapped the ley line running under my condo. As the magic poured into me, I fed in the juice I’d tasted from the demon’s manifestation in the Between. The screen flickered and displayed the results.

The entry was titled Interdimensional Gate and I already knew most of what it said. “What the hell? It’s just a gate. It’s not that different from the one Honey showed me. It’s built to draw a lot more juice and it’s more complex…”

“Your gate was only designed to open a way to the Between,” Adan said, scanning the words and diagrams on the screen. “This spell is meant to tunnel all the way into the Deep Beyond.”

“Like to Avalon or something?”

“No, a lot deeper than that. Wherever the Fomoire were banished, I guess. The Celtic legends say the ancient fey drove them into the sea.”

“The sea? That doesn’t make any sense.”

Adan shrugged. “Eire is an island. To the Celts, the sea was the edge of the world. They tried to make sense of it the best they could and I guess they were close enough. What do the Christian legends say? They were cast into the Pit or something?”

I frowned. “No clue. Either way, it doesn’t help us much. And the point is, the spell’s just a gate. This isn’t a real summoning, Adan. There’s nothing here to bind and command an entity. Mobley just threw open a door.”

“Yeah, but look here.” He pointed at a diagram that looked like something Leonardo might have drawn after a particularly bad nightmare. “Mobley is the gate. He allowed the demon to possess him. That’s how it crossed into this world.”

“That thing we fought definitely wasn’t Mobley.”

“No, once it came through, it could go anywhere it wanted, in the Between or in the mortal world. Actually, it makes a little more sense this way. This gate would be a lot easier to handle than a demon summoning, especially with the zombie outbreak softening things up.”

“Yeah, easy—you just have to let a demon possess you. Okay, let’s say Mobley has the juice to do this. Where did he learn the ritual? And how did he talk the demon into doing his dirty work without any magic to compel it?”

“Well, look, Mobley wasn’t pulling all that juice. He was giving some of his own magic up to the demon. It fed off him. Otherwise, yeah, you’re exactly right,” Adan said. “Mobley ran the same game Papa Danwe did with Oberon. He cut a deal.”

“How exactly did he make a deal with something that couldn’t manifest in this plane of existence?”

“The demon couldn’t get here without the gate, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t communicate with Mobley.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But maybe not.” I went to the kitchen and came back with a couple beers. I handed one to Adan, popped the cap off the other and took a long pull. “The last time, with Papa Danwe, I made a lot of assumptions. I was wrong about most of them and right about just enough to be dangerous. I don’t want to do it the same way this time.”

“Fair enough. All we really know is Mobley created a gate using his own body and soul, and a demon came through and attacked Oberon’s party.”

“Yeah, and we know he didn’t command or compel the demon with magic.”

Adan shook his head. “We don’t really know that. We just know you didn’t get anything from the juice the demon left behind.”

I felt like arguing, but he was right. Actually, Adan seemed to be in the habit of being right and I didn’t like it much. It was like having a neat-freak for a roommate—occasionally useful but mostly just irritating. This was probably one of the useful times so I decided to let it go.

“Okay, but I think there’s one more thing we do know. Look at the spell. Never mind how Mobley learned it—it doesn’t take that much juice. I know better than most, it’s not that hard to tear holes in the world. This one’s deep, yeah, but it’s doable, especially since he can feed the demons with his own magic. Mobley will be using the war with Terrence, and if he puts everything he has behind it, he’s got this kind of juice.”

“So he can do it again,” Adan said.

“Yeah, but only if he’s got more demons lined up he can cut deals with. Otherwise, he’s just letting them in with no way to guarantee they’ll do what he wants. They could come after him. And he can’t play host for long—from what Mr. Clean told me about demons, letting them possess you has to be bad for your health.”

“The demons probably don’t want to put Mobley at risk. They want all the players back in the game.”

“We’re speculating again,” I said. “Truth is, we don’t really know enough to hand this off to Terrence and Oberon. We saw what one of those things could do. If Mobley can bring more in, it’s fucking stupid to give him an excuse.”

“Mobley isn’t giving Terrence much of a choice. He’s either got to soldier up or lay down.”

“You’re picking up the lingo pretty good, even if you are country. Terrence has to fight, no doubt. Hell, Mobley will get suspicious if he does anything else at this point. But we can’t go at him directly. We can’t back him into a corner as long as he might have some demons in his back pocket.”

Adan nodded. “The only way we can stop him from gating in more demons is to deny him the juice he needs to work the ritual.”

“Right on, so it’s just another gang war. Terrence needs to take his streets, muscle him off his corners. No juice, no demons. Once we dry his ass out real good, then we can move in and take him down.”

“It’s a good strategy,” Adan said.

“Thanks.”

“But I don’t think it’s going to work.”

I frowned and did my best to keep the annoyance out of my voice. “Why’s that?”

“Look at it from Mobley’s perspective. He put a demon in King Oberon’s house. Maybe you’re right and he was just trying to sow dissension in the ranks, but even so it’s a damned aggressive move. He didn’t have to bring the fey into it. He didn’t even have to bring us into it. Yeah, he knew what it meant when Simeon Wale went over to Terrence’s outfit, but he could have let it go. That gave him an excuse to escalate but he didn’t have to seize the opportunity if he didn’t want to. He’s fully committed, Domino. He’s got to know he doesn’t see the other side of this thing unless he takes us all out—you, me, Terrence, Oberon. Everyone’s got to die. Which means…”

“…if he’s got more demons, he’ll use them,” I finished. “And we can’t just put a crew together and take him down. Even if we bring in the other outfits, it’s not clear we’d win an all-out war.”

“We need time,” Adan said, “but Mobley obviously isn’t going to give us any.”

“So we don’t give him any choice in it. All we really need to do is avoid committing our forces to a fight we can’t win. We can do that as long as Mobley has something to keep him busy.”

“Terrence. You’re willing to sacrifice him?”

“Call it what you want, Adan, Terrence is on the frontlines. If I’m going to be the wartime captain, some hard decisions are going to come with that. It’s the right move. If this is a fight we can’t win, our objective has to be not losing. The only way we do that is by not fully engaging the enemy. We need cannon fodder.”

“I agree, it’s the best play we’ve got. I’m just surprised. I know it can’t be an easy decision.” I met his gaze and saw something in his eyes. It was something I’d become used to seeing but had never really earned. It was respect. I didn’t feel like I’d earned it now, either. What’s so respectable about giving up a friend?

“Damn it!” I said, and slammed the laptop closed. I rubbed my eyes and temples and let out a long breath. “I was going to make an army out of this outfit, Adan, but I haven’t done shit. We should have been doing…army stuff. Training, organizing, gathering intelligence. Our guys are gangsters. They don’t know anything about being real soldiers. I don’t know anything about it, either. Now something happens, it’s exactly the kind of thing we were supposed to prepare for, and we’re sitting here with our thumbs in our asses. And the only move I’ve got is to sacrifice a friend just to buy a little time.”

“I’m not sure how much training or organizing you can do with this bunch. Even if you can turn the outfits into that kind of army, it’s not going to happen overnight. You’ve got them looking at the big picture. They’re willing to fight with you, and for something more than their own corners and rackets. That’s a small miracle in itself.”

“Intelligence is the big problem,” I said. “I may not be much of a soldier, but even a gangster knows you can’t win a war if you’re always reacting. You have to know who the enemy is, what he’s planning, and you have to go on the offensive. We can’t do that because we don’t know what’s coming or when. That’s why we don’t have any options with Mobley. We’re on defense and it’s getting our people killed.”

“We can talk to the other outfits,” Adan said. “Maybe some of them have more capabilities in that area than we do. I’ll put Chavez on it. I need to check in anyway, make sure nothing else is on fire.”

“Yeah, that’s good. Make sure he talks to Sonny Kim—the Koreans pride themselves on having better information than anybody else. And if they do have something, it’d be just like them to keep it to themselves unless we come asking.”

“What’s your next move?”

I sighed. “I have to tell Terrence to charge the fucking machine-gun nest. I have to figure out what to do about the zombies, and there’s another angle on the intelligence problem I want to try.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m going to the Feds. Those motherfuckers have to be good for something.”

All the bosses in L.A. have front businesses. Sometimes these businesses are juice boxes, like Rashan’s strip clubs and massage parlors. Other times, though, they’re just mundane enterprises meant to grease the wheels of the illegal commerce that keeps the juice flowing in the boss’s neighborhoods. Sometimes they’re even legitimate.

Terrence owned about a dozen Laundromats in South Central, and I met him at the store on Normandie the next morning. The business shared a battered, peach-colored concrete building with a tiny storefront Baptist church and a check-cashing joint. There were tags on the walls but they were defensive wards—Terrence wasn’t getting any juice from it when people fed quarters into his machines. Of the three businesses, the Laundromat seemed to be doing a more robust trade, but that may have been because it was a Tuesday.

Once the muscle out front passed me through, I found Terrence in the back working on a seventies-era dryer. The venerable machine was partially disassembled, and Terrence knelt on a drop cloth on the stained, concrete floor, pounding on something with a crescent wrench.

“Seems like you could find someone else to beat on your washing machines for you,” I noted.

Terrence jumped and banged his head on the edge of the access panel. He swore impressively and wiggled back a ways on his knees so he could turn around. He wasn’t exactly the right size to get inside most home appliances.

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