The Business Of Death, Death Works Trilogy (83 page)

Jing in Shanghai is so reserved that I can’t tell what she’s thinking. I almost detect a hint of disappointment at my appearance. I shift from regional Number Four to regional Number Four. Cerbo’s absolutely right, as much as I am itching to find out how Morrigan is involved in the End of Days, Mortmax needs to know that I am back.

Everywhere I go I can feel the fear behind the civility and the regular functioning of Mortmax. These are people desperately holding on to normalcy, because it’s all they have. Time’s running down, and we’re all too aware of that.

I stress that I’m doing everything I can, and they all say they believe me, but I can’t see too much of that in their eyes.

I even manage to get some more Pomps out of each region, though no one is that keen to give me too many, even though we’re rubbing up against the twenty-fourth. I’ve found that while I may be
Mortmax’s CEO I’m not all-powerful. Not even Mog can make me that. These are hardened Ankous, they know how to stand up to one of the Orcus, and their skills haven’t slipped now that there is only The Orcus.

They are deferential but I know that they mumble behind my back. That as much as they hope otherwise, they doubt I am up to the job. And several of them are not above considering another Schism. Corporate culture doesn’t change overnight. And unlike Australia—where it pretty much did, because in one night Morrigan slaughtered just about everyone in the business—they may have lost their Regional Managers, but they didn’t lose anyone else.

If they could, there’s not a single one of them that wouldn’t slash my throat for a chance at the top job. Not a single one—from Cerbo to David and Christine. Except Tim, of course. That’s the other vexing thing, though. Tim gets a much easier job of it. I feel that they respect him, much more than they’ve ever respected me. The same goes for Lissa. They approach my two closest friends with a warmth, a genuine warmth. Tim and Lissa are seen as deserving. Tim and Lissa have reputations. And they didn’t spend the first three months on the job in various degrees of drunk.

I know I should have worked harder at changing that perception, and maybe I have a little, but they still think I’m an absolute fucking dolt. As far as they see it, a slacker has taken hold of the reins.

Morrigan’s house is in the outer suburbs, near Eight Mile Plains, about twenty minutes south of Brisbane’s CBD. It’s my house now. I’d been surprised to discover that he’d left it to me in his will. You can’t say that Morrigan didn’t plan for every eventuality. I guess he never expected it to turn out this way, and it had been really hard for me to resist burning his house to the ground, just like he did mine.

His house is in one of the few streets in Brisbane that are lined
with deciduous trees, and they’ve already dropped most of their leaves. Gives the area a mood that a lot of Brisbane doesn’t have, feels a couple of degrees colder here too, though I know it’s an illusion. When the wind blows it crackles. The street is almost charmingly eerie, an otherworld sort of Brisbane, here in one of the southernmost tips of the city.

And it’s quiet. Far too quiet for late morning in the burbs. I realize then that I don’t hear any heartbeats. That’s not right. Unless something is blocking them. My skin prickles. Stirrers.

I don’t know why I haven’t noticed it until now, but the house next to Morrigan’s possesses an awful lot of aerials. And the one behind his does too, not to mention the one on the other side. That stops me. I check the lawn beneath my feet. It’s dead, dry compacted soil. Other than my Avians there are no birds moving in the sky overhead. There’s a shrill dog barking a couple of blocks away. But it stops even as I listen. My skin tightens, I can taste something familiar and unpleasant in the air: faint, hidden, but no less recognizable for it. And now that I am standing very still I can feel them.

Five months ago, Alex had come across a house in the inner burbs, its roof crammed with aerials, its rooms covered with arcane symbols and filled with Stirrers—like a share house of the Undead. Lissa had suggested the place had been used to create a thinning in the earth-Hell interface, the offshoot of which was the generation of storms, storms that dulled my senses to both Stirrers and the assassin/torturer of the season, Francis Rillman. After we had, I had…dealt with Rillman, we’d scoured the city for similar hiding places, and come up with nothing.

Two months of concerted hunting and while the number of stirs had gradually increased, we’d not found a single residence. Until now.

Morrigan’s place is surrounded by them. How did my Avians miss this? They’ve caught sight of Stirrers all up and down the coast. All
I can think is that they’ve been established only recently—it’s been a couple of months since I last came here. Mr. D is right. The presence of the approaching Stirrer god is doing more than increasing the anxiety levels at work. It’s also reducing my perceptions.

I close my eyes to get my nearest Avian’s view. It’s of my back from below. Funny, I didn’t think I had a crow that close. I turn around and look across the lawn. I can’t see anything, but the Avian is watching me. I summon it. Nothing. I walk towards it, growing taller in its sight.

There it is, or what’s left of it. A crow’s skull at the base of the nearest telephone pole. Charred tendrils of flesh and feathers cling to the bone. I crouch down, and pick it up. A flash of light, my fingers sting. I drop the skull and it shatters, taking its vision with it.

Not good at all.

The game has changed and I don’t know the rules. Something has flipped while I wasn’t looking. Perhaps the Stirrers have merely been in hiding. The thought’s terrifying and oddly exhilarating. At least something is happening. While the Stirrers did nothing there was no way we could fight them. Now they are in motion, now we have a chance to hit back.

I whisper Mog into being, the knives slide from their sheaths, and wrap around each other, swift as a breath, and I’m holding the scythe. I walk across Morrigan’s yard, leap over the fence to the house closest, and straight onto a dead lawn that collapses beneath me. I throw my arms out towards the edge of the pit, but it’s too late. I fall and fall hard.

A wooden shaft drives through my ribcage and out my shoulder. I’d scream, but the breath is knocked from me. My weight is dragging me down the spike, leaving a dewy red stripe of bubbling blood as it goes. The damn thing’s driven through a lung. I’m faced with the sick-making sensation of my skin healing around the wound, and then breaking again as I sink. Each time it does, I dry heave, which
only tears my flesh even more. My boots touch the ground and start bearing my weight.

Mog’s just out of reach and I whisper it to me. There’s something comforting about the contact, though even moving the muscles required to close my fingers around it is agony.

Not that clever,
I think. I try and breathe, manage a few shallow breaths, spots dance before my eyes. The wound’s pushing against the wood trying to heal it away, as if it might somehow crush it. Give it time, days or weeks, and it probably will. But I don’t have days or weeks. The shaft extends three feet above my head. I try to stand on my toes, but the merest movement upwards hurts bad enough that I almost black out. Can’t pull myself free, but I can shift.

I do, just a few feet. The pain almost drops me to my knees, blood gouts from the entry and exit points. But only for a moment, my skin closes over the wound, these are regular wounds, no supernatural toxins, and my body deals with them swiftly. Muscle heals. Jesus, it hurts and I stand there unsteady on my feet, helped only by leaning on the shafts around me. They must have built this late at night, maybe coopted whoever came along to check up on it. Snap someone’s neck, inhabit the body with a Stirrer, and you’ve got another worker. The invasion’s begun. I raise my head and stare up at the comet in the sky.

Once I can breathe clearly, I notice the smell. There’s a dog down here with me. No, two dogs.

They’re remarkably well preserved, but that would make sense. Not much can live near a Stirrer for long, not even bacteria. They draw life through to the Underworld like vacuum cleaners. Keeps their bodies smelling fresh too. I peer down at the dogs. One looks like it may have choked to death, its collar twisted tight around its neck. I imagine the poor things’ last moments. Don’t need to imagine too hard. Fucking Stirrers.

One of the dog’s eyes open. It growls at me, it twists it head hard, snaps the brittle leather of its collar, and jumps to its feet.

Not a zombie dog, surely. I take a step back and yelp as the other dog’s teeth clamp around my ankle. I swing my scythe as best I can in the cramped confines of the pit. The snath of the scythe connects with the head of the dog that is wrapped around my leg. Dog jawbone breaks and the pressure’s released.

I’m already whispering the Knives of Negotiation back into existence. Better for this sort of fighting. The first dog leaps up at my throat. But I’m ready for it, I neatly sever its head from its body. These knives are sharp. Sometimes I forget just how sharp. The look of shock on the Stirrer-dog’s face is almost comical.

The other dog backs away. I throw my knife at its skull, splitting it in two.

I’ve never seen this before. I didn’t even know that Stirrers could inhabit animals. Is it really a Stirrer inhabiting the corpse or a Stirrer-dog equivalent? Regardless, it’s a worrying development heaped onto a whole series of worrying developments.

Well, two can play at this game. I shift out of the pit and do what I should have done earlier: summon my Avian Pomps. In a few moments they line the fence like something out of Hitchcock’s
The Birds
. I tell them to wait there, that this may not be as bad as I think.

There’s a mask painted over the door of Morrigan’s neighbor’s house. It’s glowing softly. Do they know I’m here? Are there masks glowing inside?

I kick the door open. My skin crawls, like it’s trying to slip my bones and get the hell out of there.

The room is a basic plan, one of those cookie-cutter homes, door leading into a living room, leading into a kitchen. Bedrooms and bathroom presumably tucked away down a corridor to the right. Someone put in a real effort to make something of it though. There are paintings on the walls, two broad bookcases filled with books, or what once were
books. They’re ash now, the bookcases burnt black. The paintings are smeared with excrement and old blood, but the real show is on the ceiling, bound there in wire. Half-a-dozen Stirrers. And they can no longer be mistaken for human. Eyeless, their fingers scarred and black from tip to palm. They scratch about overhead, like newly woken things. I wonder if my presence has somehow activated them.

The floor is covered in what I suspect is dried fecal matter and pus. Something drops to the ground from the ceiling. A twisted little white shape. A maggot of some sort. There’s a loud sniffing, snuffling sound coming from above my head. The creatures no longer require breath, it’s a desiccated sort of snorting.

I heft Mog in one hand and swing, cutting through wire and flesh. The first Stirrer falls, squealing like a pig. It grabs at my legs as I stall it. Its soul tears through me. There’s nothing delicate or subtle about that pain. This is a Stirrer long in its host and it doesn’t want to go. I take the next one as swiftly as I can. And the next. The air crackles, something builds. I look to the Stirrer in the far corner of the room. Its fingertips are consumed by blue flame. The flesh along its limbs darkens and bubbles.

A burst of electricity strikes me.

I’m hurled back through the doorway. My heart stops, only to start up again. No easy way to death for me. The stench of burning hair fills the room. My hair!

The Stirrer cackles a breathy whistling chortle that can’t be described as human.

Thing is, I’m not human either.

And I’m not alone.

Crows and sparrows fill the room. Beaks drive through flesh, claws scratch. Dry blood rains down. In a furious confusion of feathers and avian screams the Stirrers are stalled.

There are more in the other rooms. But we are swift in dispatching them. We’ve had plenty of practice.

When the job is done. I stagger outside, run a hand over my healing scalp. There’s no chance of hair for weeks.

Well, that just makes me angrier.

The next three houses are worse, though I negotiate their lawns carefully to avoid any traps and I use my Avians without hesitation. Fire and feathers and screams, though I think there’s no one left to hear them. They’ve used families. Kids and adults. They’ve made an aberration of suburbia, they’ve cut out the heart of the world where I grew up and reinserted howling pod people.

Each stall becomes dirtier and grimmer. But I do the work, and I do it without complaint. There’s a satisfaction to it.

When I’m almost done, one of the last Stirrers stalling beneath my bloody fingers, crows dispatching the rest, my phone rings.

It’s Tim.

“I’m back, mate.”

The silence down the other end of the line extends for painful moments. “Yeah. I had to find out from Cerbo. Cerbo, of all bloody people. Oh, then the other Ankous, talking about you, fucking tweeting about you, about how confident you seemed—statesmanlike, would you believe. Couldn’t you have at least called? Let me know that you were OK?”

“I was going to, but I had to follow a hunch first.”

“What hunch?”

The Stirrer hangs limply from its chains, my bloody palm print across its face.