Almost Alive (The Beautiful Dead Book 3) (19 page)

“We’re going to be spending a lot of time together.”

He looks at me. “Yes, we are,” he agrees, smiling.

“I meant all of us. The Undead of the city, whoever ends up leaving. We’re all going to be spending lots of time around one another and …” I figure out my words, sucking my tongue for a pensive moment. “There are some things you’ve learned, John. Secrets. Big secrets. I just need to emphasize how so very, very important it is that you …
keep
those secrets.”

“You mean about your mom?” he blurts.

I hide the annoyance on my face, peer left, peer right, then nod silently at him.

He catches my drift, leans in and quietly whispers, “You never spoke badly about her. I don’t understand how her identity being a secret is so necessary. She was a Queen, once? Of the Deathless?”

“Self-named Queen of this very city,” I answer. “She birthed the whole Deathless movement. She’s responsible for the killing and the torturing of hundreds. Through her, Grimsky’s Green Army was born, which then was responsible for killing many Humans, including—”
You
, I almost say. I clench shut my eyes, then finish: “Brock. The one from the bar.”

“Oh, the Chief guy.” I nod. “Alright. So, she was a big deal. And this Grimsky … Is this Grimsky still around?”

“I hope not.”

“But the little guy,” John says, sorting it all out in his head, “is only going to help us if he gets to … ‘kill’ this Grimsky guy, right? If we don’t even know if he’s around, then how’s he—”

“We don’t know if
any
of them are around, John.” I sigh, push myself off the wall. “My mother. Shee. Grim. We have no idea. We could find piles of dust for all we know. All I care about is getting that stone back.”

“And the stone’s going to save us?”

I look up into his eyes. He smiles when my gaze meets his, John’s whole face lighting up and his fingers wiggling at each other as he remains there, perched and gentle and adorable. Grim killed the dark John I’d come to love, and the Whispers gave me this sweet, childlike John who treats this Second Life like some fun new toy. I worry what his Waking Dream will do to him. This adventure could be our last. These days, our last we’ll ever have, and he’s smiling like a boy with candy in his palm.

“The stone’s the only thing that can save us,” I say.

Too soon, John tells me the sun’s dropped below the walls of the city. We make our way to the gate where the rest of the Undead await. I am amazed to find, including John and I, that fifteen Undead have come. Among the fifteen I see Marigold and her chipper eyes, Ann and her dead ones, and the Chief shrouded in his cinched cloak.

I also find a girl whose face I recognize right away. How have I not yet run into her? I’d assumed she was destroyed at Garden or somehow fallen to pieces. She wears an oversized blouse and ill-fitting woolen pants. Her hair is tied up in a tight ponytail. When I approach, I greet her with, “Helen,” because calling her Brains—like everyone else used to—is just rude. To be fair, months after rescuing her from the Deathless, she had to be isolated right away because she kept trying to eat people and all she could say on constant loop was
I … am … Deathless
. I wanted to name her Helen, after my now-late Reaper.

The Undead circle of Unlife.

She lifts her eyebrows way too far, parts her mouth, prepares herself for a solid ten seconds, then emits the soft monotone words of: “I … am …
not
… death.” She smiles proudly.

Well, it’s progress.

A moment later, Megan emerges from around the bend. Slowly marching behind her is the stiff-legged little man I’ll reluctantly refer to as Lynx, as that is what Megan insisted was his name. She brings him attached by his bound hands with a length of chain.

Megan stops in front of me and hands it off. I take it, a look of confusion likely washing across my face. “Yours,” she says simply. “You are the one with whom the deal has been made. He is yours, bound by chain, until the terms of the deal are met.”

So … he’s like my dog, apparently. And what she’s handing me is a leash. “Alright,” I mutter unhappily.

“I’m yours,” grunts the little Lock, and I squint at him, finding his face contorted by what might be a grin. He’s playing with me. Yes, that’s what kind of journey I’ve got to look forward to. Great.

Megan regards him with little compassion, then faces the group. “I want you all to understand, you are
not
hereby exiled from New Trenton, nor are you being in any form
sent away
. This is your home and it will always be your home, and at any point in your journey, you are welcome back to it.”

I realize Megan has taken a page from
my
book and decided it smart to give them the false sense of choice. It is a false sense, of course, because in reality, unless we wish simply to turn to dust someday, we have no choice. It’s either find Shee … or find oblivion.

“Take confidence with you that, while Julianne may have tried to pave the way, the many of you will be stronger together and will see the mission through,” Megan tells them, her stern, rusty voice providing the pep talk I never could. “You
will
succeed, my friends.”

There is no dissention anymore, perhaps because those who were so adamantly opposed to leaving are, in fact, not leaving. I take mental note of one other who isn’t leaving: the man who proved to be a guilty blood-eater, as he’s being held safely in the depths of that dungeon from which we just dug out the former-Lock.

I spot the warm russet face of Ash and the cold chalky one of Lena. I see the young Undead boy from the crowd of earlier and the two plump men with beards who could be brothers but are not: Bill and Will. I’ll call him Will because I can’t get his name right … or maybe I refuse to. There’s two seemingly teenaged girls, one of them curvy and short and blue-haired, the other so tall and bony and long she looks like she’s been pulled through a machine. She might’ve been. There’s also a very, very old man with yellowy skin who looks vaguely familiar.

Then I spot the diffident, little eyes of Collin. I gawp, the severity of this whole Undead departure hitting me quite suddenly at the sight of him. “But the doctor …” I breathe to Megan, incredulous, hardly able to form the words. “The doctor can’t … The city needs …”

“Rake and Robin are well-trained,” Megan explains quietly to me without my having to carry on. “They have assistants of their own at the hospital as well. Collin prefers to leave, I assure you. After his brother met his fate, he wants to do all in his power to … save his own.”

“Oh.” I put a reluctant hand on Megan’s shoulder, unsure why I’m doing so. “Alright, okay.” Maybe it’s to help myself from falling over, as if I’m still capable of losing blood to my head and fainting. Joke’s on me: I’ve got no blood in any part of my body, let alone my stupid, worry-plagued head. “So be it.”

At the front of the crowd, I notice Ann sorting through the equipment she’d pulled from the guardsmen arsenal, armoring the various Dead with metal leggings and breastplates and helmets that I assume to be our futile attempt to protect ourselves against Mother Nature, our true enemy. I watch her with sulky, half-opened eyes. I humor myself and wait for her to pull out umbrellas.

“The journey will be long and terrible,” sings the dwarf at my back. I’ve forgotten how oddly high-pitched his gravelly voice can get. “Maybe you’d be kind enough to carry me, lest I slow you down. Ha, ha, ha … ha …”

“Or I could pull off your legs and stuff you in a bag,” I suggest coolly, “and not have to deal with the nuisance of this dog leash.”

“What’s a dog?”

“Don’t tempt me,” I warn him uncaringly, though it occurs to me that the little Lock might, in fact,
not
know what a dog is.

John is fitted into a breastplate, a horned helmet pulled onto his head. He turns to me and grins through the mouthpiece, as if we’d just given him his favorite Halloween costume. He moves his arms and shrugs his shoulders, getting acclimated to the way the armor moves. He volunteers to carry one of the tents that will laughably protect us, should a stray storm happen our way. Ann helps strap it to his back.

“Sixteen,” I murmur, counting the leashed Lynx. “Where’s Jasmine?”

“Stayed behind, I’m sure,” answers Megan. “Likely in her home, oblivious to it all. I haven’t heard from her in weeks. She … keeps to herself mostly. I’m sorry to say, she’s not the socialite she used to be.”

“You’re not leaving without me,” I hear someone shouting. It’s a clumsily-walking already-armored man with a fat helmet on his head that muffles his words and his jagged breath. Wait … his jagged breath? “I’m not gonna let you go. You
deliberately
let me nap too long, thinking I wouldn’t notice you gone and, and, and—”

“Oh, off with it, Jim,” shouts Ann, identifying the man for all of us with question marks on our faces. “I wasn’t going to leave without saying goodbye. Goodness.”

“You’re
not
saying goodbye,” he grunts, coming up to her side, his armor clinking awkwardly, “because I’m coming with you.”

“The hell you are,” she barks back.

“You need someone to read the skies!” he shouts. He flips up his visor, revealing his knobby, blemished face and a tuft of black stringy hair flattened to his forehead by sweat. “I will read the skies for everyone. I will warn you of daylight and nightlight and I will tell you when rain approaches. I will watch for you all.”

“And you’ll need
sleep
,” Ann complains. “And you’ll
slow us down
when you sleep. And besides, we already have among us a strange Undead anomaly who can read the skies plenty well enough.”

A few faces turn to John, knowing already. Word spread quickly about his strange condition and, oddly enough, no one’s paid it much mind until now.

“Oh,” mutters John suddenly, realizing it’s him she’s talking about.

Jim’s voice is quieter now, directed at only Ann, though we all can still hear him. “B-But the Undead can’t see the skies,” he says, and it sounds like he’s telling her a fact she weren’t already mind-numbingly aware of.

“John can see light,” she explains to him, as though teaching some big dumb child. “I told you this. Twice now and we even had a conversation about it last night when you were eating dinner.”

“Oh.” He glances at John, regarding him suspiciously, then returns his dull gaze back to Ann. “You sure it wasn’t somebody else?”

“Go home, Jim.” He snorts, annoyed. “Oh, right.
Jimmy
, of course. Go home. We’ll be back and we’ll be triumphant and we’ll have with us a Lock-eye the size of my head. Please, Jimmy. I love you and all that. Go.”

With that, he yanks off the helmet, throws it into the bin of unused armor, then tramps off, his face flushed. He only looks back over his shoulder once to mumble, “Should’ve died for you,” before disappearing around the bend of the road. The noise of his heavily-armored footfalls is still heard even after he’s well out of view.

Soon, the Undead have organized, and the gates creak loudly as they part to let us out. I run an anxious hand down the strap that holds the Judge’s sheathed steel sword to my back, laced with unvoiced feeling. Megan is standing aloof, unmoving as a statue, her hands clasped and her eyes solemn as she watches us depart. I don’t want to start Undead-crying, already heavy with emotion as I am, so I give her a simple nod as we pass through the gates. She returns it just as simply, and not once does my lifelong friend look away.

“Ready to give the dog a nice walking?” asks Lynx, his voice playing smart with me.

“Ah,” I remark, a trace of genuine surprise finding me. “So you
do
know the animal.”

“Your mother told me a thing or two about her time.” Lynx giggles, and it sounds like the hopping of nails in a rusty tin. “I felt so privileged. I learned about houses by the sea, about airplanes and telephones and dogs …”

“You weren’t privileged,” I snap back. “You were just another tool of hers, doing her bidding. Don’t kid yourself. Whether my dog or hers, you’ve been a dog both your Lives.” He’s angering me and we’re not even two hundred feet from the Necropolis.

“It wasn’t my being anyone’s dog that gave me such intelligences,” he responds. “It wasn’t even the green rock in my face nor the offputting metal of my leg.” His words are slick as slime, no matter the gravel-like unpleasantness of his voice. “Ha, ha … I find that I learn the most by doing quite a … simpler … thing.”

The gates groan, the noise of them tearing through the woods. The sixteen of us stop for a moment to watch, appreciating the force of those huge, heavy metal things squeezing shut. When the last sliver of the city is closed off between those ugly doors, the thud they make is not unlike the slam of a judge’s gavel. All of us, sentenced to the journey ahead.

“What’s that simpler thing?” I bother to ask.

He answers: “I listen.”