Dead Beat

"Put him in the back," I said.

Thomas opened the door and set Butters in the backseat. The little guy leaned his head against the wall and sat all curled up. You could have fit him into a paper grocery sack.

"Mouse," I said. "In."

Mouse prowled into the backseat and sat leaning against Butters, serious dark eyes never leaving Liver Spots.

"All right," I said, passing the shotgun to Thomas. "It works like this. Thomas, you get in the back. Spots, you’re riding shotgun. And when I say riding shotgun, I mean that Thomas is going to shove it up your ass and pull the trigger if you try anything funny."

He stared at me, eyes flat.

"Do you understand me?" I said.

He nodded, eyes narrowed.

"Say it," I told him.

Raw hatred dripped from his words. "I understand you."

"Good," I said. "Get in."

Liver Spots walked toward the car. He had to step around me to get to the passenger side door, and when he drew even with me he suddenly stopped and stared at me. There was a puzzled frown on his face. He stayed that way for a second, looking at me from soles to scalp.

"What?" I demanded.

"Where is it?" he said. He sounded as if he was speaking for his own benefit rather than for mine. "Why isn’t it here?"

"I’ve had a long day," I told him. "Shut your mouth and get in the car."

For a second I saw his eyes, and at my words they suddenly burned with a manic loathing and scorn. I could see, quite clearly, that Liver Spots wanted me dead. There wasn’t anything rational or calm about it. He wanted to hurt me, and he wanted me to die. It was written in his eyes so strongly that it might as well have been tattooed across his face. I needed no soulgaze, no magic, to recognize murderous hate when I saw it.

And he still looked familiar, though for the life of me-maybe literally-I couldn’t remember from where.

I avoided his eyes in time to avert a soulgaze of my own and said, "Get into the car."

He said, "I’m going to kill you. Perhaps not tonight. But soon. I’m going to see you die."

"You’ll have to wait in line, Spots," I told him. "I hear the only tickets left are in general admission."

He narrowed his eyes and began to speak.

Mouse let out a sudden, warning snarl.

I tensed, watching Liver Spots, but he did the same thing I did. He flinched and then looked warily around. When his eyes got to a spot behind me, they widened.

Thomas had the shotgun on him, so I turned from Liver Spots and looked for myself.

From the rain and the dark came a rising cloud of light. It drew nearer with unsettling speed, and after only a few speeding heartbeats I could see what made the light.

They were ghosts.

Surrounded in a sickly greenish glow, a company of Civil War-era cavalry rushed toward us, dozens of them. There should have been a rumble of thundering hooves accompanying them, but there was only a distant and pale sound of a running herd. The riders wore broad-brimmed Union hats and jackets that looked black rather than blue in the sickly light, and bore pistols and sabers in their semitransparent hands. One of the lead riders lifted a trumpet to his lips as he rode, and ghostly strains of the cavalry charge drifted through the night air.

Behind them, mounted on phantom horses that looked as if they’d been drowned, were Li Xian and the Corpsetaker. The ghoul wore a tom-tom drum at his side, held in place by a heavy leather belt draped sideways from one shoulder. While he rode, he beat out a staccato military rhythm on it with one hand, and it sounded somehow primitive and wild. The Corpsetaker had changed into clothes made of heavy biker leather, complete with a chain gauntlet and spiked fighting bracers on her forearms. She wore a curved sword on her belt, a heavy tulwar that looked ugly and murderous. As she came closer, she sent her ghostly steed racing to the head of the troop and drew her blade. She spun it over her head, laughing in wild abandon, and bore straight down upon us.

"Treachery!" howled Liver Spots. "We are betrayed!"

Grevane appeared in the mist from among the motionless zombies. He stared at the oncoming Corpsetaker and let out a howl of rage. He raised his hands, and every zombie in sight abruptly stiffened and then broke into a charge.

"Kill them!" Grevane howled. Actual, literal foam formed at the corners of his mouth, and his eyes burned beneath the brim of the fedora. "Kill them all!"

Liver Spots whirled toward me, producing a tiny pistol from somewhere in his sleeve, a derringer. From the size of it, it couldn’t have held a very heavy bullet, but he wouldn’t need it to be heavy to kill me at this range. I dove back and to my right, trying to get the car between Liver Spots and me. There was a startling popping sound and a flash of light. I hit the muddy gravel hard. Liver Spots came around the car after me, evidently determined to use the second bullet in the pistol.

Thomas didn’t have time to get out of the car. There was a sudden explosion and my windshield blew outward in a cloud of shot and shattered glass. Both tore into Liver Spots, and he stumbled and went down.

I lifted my staff in my good hand and brought it down hard on his wrist. There was a brittle, snapping sound, and the little gun flew from his grasp.

He went into an utter rage.

Before I knew what was happening, Liver Spots had thrown himself on top of me and had both of his hands fastened on my throat. I felt him shut off my airway, and struggled against him. It didn’t do much good. The old man seemed filled with maddened strength.

"It’s mine!" he screamed at me. He shook me on each word, slamming my head back against the gravel in precise, separate detonations of pain and bright stars in my vision. "Give it to me! Mine!"

A zombie landed on the gravel near us in a crouch and turned toward me. Its dead eyes regarded me without passion or thought as it formed a fist and drove it at my head.

Before it could land, a flickering saber from one of the spectral cavalry whispered through the night and the rain and struck the zombie on the neck. The corpse’s head flew from its shoulders, dribbling a line of sludgy black ichor, and landed with its empty eyes staring into mine.

Thomas screamed, "Down!"

I stopped struggling to get up, and tried to press myself as flat to the ground as I could.

The driver’s-side door to the Beetle flew open, swept just over the end of my nose, and struck Liver Spots in the face. He flew back from me.

Thomas leaned out of the driver’s side to grab at me, but a second ghostly horseman swept by, sword hissing. Thomas ducked in time to save his neck, but took part of the slash across his temple and ear and scalp, and that side of his head and shoulder was almost immediately covered in a sheet of blood a few shades too pale to be human.