|
This is the first story in a cycle I call
“Ghost Hunters.” It runs about 16,000
words. This is only the rudimentary form of the
page – quick and dirty, primarily because I promised loyal listeners at the
first-ever reading of excerpts from the piece at Bubonicon in Aside from better formatting, in its full
glory the story will be lavishly illustrated by This is an experiment for him and for
me. Please bear with us. I think the results will justify your
patience. Thanks!
And enjoy. –
Victor Milán, |
The
by
Victor Milán
The twins exchanged knowing glances. “Here they come,” Tian said.
“I don’t believe
it,” their female companion said. Her
words came in clouds in the doorslam cold of a midwinter
“This isn’t as weird as it gets, Missa,” said her boyfriend Trey, with a glance at their host and hostess. “But it sure is adequately weird.”
It probably was. There were no cars on the street but there was traffic. A dozen men and women in traditional Chinese garb, the men – one enormously tall – wearing little square hats with tassels, walking north on Broadway in a line. Or not walking: hopping. With their arms out stiffly in front of them. Even at this distance the onlookers could see the hat-tassels flapping in time to their hops. Their hands and faces were blue. Maybe it was a trick of the streetlights.
An elderly Chinese man with a short staff tucked under one arm and bundled in a thick coat trotted up and down the file like an Australian sheepdog. He wasn’t blue.
Maybe it wasn’t a trick of the streetlights.
Missa cocked an eye at the twins, Wan and Tian Wu. They were a year or so older than she and her boyfriend, who were just nineteen. The four were on the roof of the two-story Broadway Metal Recyclers, in the light-industrial zone a few blocks north of downtown, with a couple bottles of wine and some reefer.
“And they are – ?” she asked.
“Dead,” said Tian. She sat on the housing of an evaporative cooler shrouded in blue plastic against the winter, gently drumming the heels of her Nikes on its sides. She was compact, with a young-looking, almost insipidly pretty face: an easy sort of person to dismiss. She liked it that way. She had on one of those currently-fashionable poofy sectioned anoraks, which made you look as if you had the Michelin Tire Man perched not too many branches above you in your family tree. Her name meant Day in Cantonese.
“The corpses of
traditionally-minded Chinese,” Wan said.
Wan was short for Wanshang,
meaning Night, although he was
nowhere averse to having it spelled as the locally appropriate Juan, as in Don. He had extremely long black hair drawn into a
topknot that hung down past the shoulder-yoke of his black leather greatcoat
like a horse’s tail. He was tall for an
Asian kid, maybe
“Every year the
Necromancer Ling rounds up as many of them as he can find and hauls them back
to
Tian took a long swig from a bottle. She wore an Orioles cap backwards on her head. “Couple of them look pretty rough,” she said. “Maybe Originals.”
“Originals?” Trey asked. He was a good-looking kid whose skin was the color of cream with a little coffee in it. He had a wisp of goatee and a furze of coarse and curly black hair that in better light showed auburn undertones. A long thin queue hung down the back of his black London Fog trenchcoat.
“Chinese who came over to build the railways in the 1870s or ’80s,” Wan said. “That’s how our mom’s family got here.”
“They’re ghosts?” Missa asked. She was actually named Michelle, but insisted everyone call her by her childhood nickname, for obscure reasons. A computer hardware wizard, she currently worked onsite PC repair for a local firm. She was a very thin woman, with striking narrow features, a broken nose, and the kinky cloud of honey-colored hair of a pre-Raphaelite maid. Except she had none of the wispy wimpy quality of your true pre-Raphaelite, despite her skinniness; her eyes were dark and intense as a kestrel’s. She wore a black leather jacket, jeans, and biker boots.
“Uh-huh,” Tian said.
“They hop.”
Wan smiled. “That’s why they call them ‘hopping ghosts.’ Gyonsi or jiangshi.”
Missa looked from Wan to Tian and back again, suspicion in her eyes. Until very recently she had known the twins only as a couple of reasonably cool kids who taught gongfu and taijiquan at the Red Dragon Institute of Chinese Martial Arts (a storefront) to the likes of her and her boyfriend, and whose Dad, a retired Los Alamos scientist, had just hired Trey to build the family business a network and do sysadmin stuff. Now it was turning out they either led a very peculiar life Missa knew flat nothing about or were full-on crazy. Unless she were full-on crazy.
“I thought you said they were corpses. They look pretty substantial to me.”
“Whole concept’s a little slippery,” Wan admitted.
“Basically the ghosts of the departed have been called back temporarily to re-animate their bodies,” Tian said.
“Doesn’t that piss them off?”
Wan shrugged. “Well, that would be a major reason there aren’t a lot of practicing necromancers in the world today.”
“Steep learning curve,” Tian added.
“So what’s with the little pieces of yellow paper stuck to their foreheads?”
“Those are sutras,” said Trey. He did not usually suffer from know-it-all-itis, but he was a bit out of depth here, even though he had a better idea of what it was the twins did than his girlfriend. He was just trying to claim a patch of relatively firm footing. “Sayings of the Buddha. Also Taoist charms.”
“Which aren’t technically sutras, but that’s what we call ’em,” Tian said. “They keep the corpses under control. If they fall off, the stiffs might get cranky and start biting people’s throats. This would be bad for Necromancer Ling’s business.”
“What does he do with them?” Missa asked. Her tone suggested she had not yet made up her mind which would bother her more, not knowing or hanging out with the sort of people who would know what an aging Chinese gentleman might find to do with twelve hopping corpses.
“About this time
each year he makes a pass through the Southwest, um, resurrecting them,” Wan said, digging a plastic Wal-Mart jug of
pre-mixed wine cooler out of the green and white plastic chest they’d lugged
along. “Then he herds them up this way.
He’ll stash ’em in a warehouse just south of I-40, packing them in ice
to keep them from getting too ripe and with sutras all around to make them stay
put. Then he’ll go off and spend the
rest of the evening at one of those trailer massage parlors up the street north
of Candelaria. In the morning he’ll meet
our father for menudo and coffee at the Sanitary Tortilla Factory
downtown. Then he’ll pack his charges
aboard a freight car and ship them off to
“On yellow paper,” Tian added with cartoon gravity.
“They’ll then be put on board a freighter owned by the People’s Liberation Army that probably just offloaded a hullfull of illicit Type 56 rifles – that’s Chinese AK-47s, full auto – so they make it back to the old country in time for Chinese New Year.”
“Which is coming up February the 5th,” Tian said, “so Ling better make it snappy.” It was early January, 2000, just a few days after the celebrated Y2K nonevent..
“You have got to be shitting me,” Missa said at length.
“Not a word of it,” Wan said.
“Menudo,” Trey said. “Gack.”
“They eat worse
back in
“A Chinese necromancer has a taste for Mexican food?” Missa asked.
Tian pondered. She was unsure yet how much she liked Missa. Tian had more than a little bit of an eye for Trey, who was very pretty. Missa was not the sort inclined to share.
“New Mexican,” Tian corrected. The twins were native born to the state, still a minority.
“Some of the finest New Mexican cooks in the Southwest are relatives of ours,” put in Wan, who was something of the diplomat. Also he visibly did not deplore the sight of Missa. “Necromancer Ling’s, too, for that matter.”
“How long has this been going on?” Trey asked. Being a guy, albeit a very good guy, he would have been fine if both twins got their way with him and Missa, respectively. But Missa was the exclusive type, and he was the loyal type, so there it was. “The, ah, the corpse drives, I mean. Not Chinese Mexican restaurants of the Southwest.”
“Decades,” Tian said. She took off her cap and shook her pinned-up hair as if to rearrange it and just accidentally shifted a little on the air-conditioner housing so her blue-jean-encased haunch pressed against Trey’s arm where he stood leaning next to her.
“Maybe longer,” Wan said. “Nobody’s too sure how old Ling is. I always wondered if he might know a few life-extension kind of tricks, being a necromancer and all.”
“I remember when we were kids,” Tian said. “Every year we’d come out to watch the corpse drive. Used to love it almost as much as Halloween or Christmas. OK, not Christmas.” Tian was a noted Christmas fan. Especially the lights. And the presents.
“This was a big childhood occasion,” Missa asked deliberately, “coming out in the cold to watch the blue dead people hop by?”
Down on Broadway the blue dead people were doing just that. Wan laughed quietly. “What you have to keep in mind is, we were raised to this from the time we were born.”
“If not before,” Tian said. “I wouldn’t put it past Dad to have irradiated us in the womb in hopes we’d turn out to be some kind of super-mutants.”
Wan frowned. That was tender territory. Their father had been a famous physicist,
famous among other physicists anyway, an authority on quantum mechanics who
worked on top-secret projects at
“Wait one,” Missa said, scowling. “Corpses a hundred and twenty years old would be just bones, wouldn’t they? Gnarly mummies at best. These look, well. . . .”
“Well fleshed-out,” Wan supplied.
“I asked Necromancer Ling about that when we were kids,” Tian said. “My brother wanted to know too, but he was too big a chicken to ask.”
“I was respectful of my elders,” Wan said. His dignity was sadly impaired by the fact he’d just taken a protracted toke, and squeaked and fumed when he spoke.
“That’s what I said. So I asked, and old Master Ling told me he had some means of partially reconstituting them.”
“ – just add water – ” Wan said.
“When I bugged him about how, he said a necromancer had to keep some secrets. He threatened to switch my backside. Crusty old bastard. Although these days, if he weren’t so old, I must just consider – ”
“Anyway,” Wan said, “there does seem to be only so far he can bring them back. And he can only do it the once.”
“What I don’t understand,” said Trey, sipping from a plastic cup, “is how come nobody freaks out, or even reports this to the cops.”
“And says what?” Tian asked brightly.
Wan shrugged. “People see what they expect to see. They are not prepared to see a dozen deceased Chinese being herded down the street like something from a zombi Rawhide.”
He and his sister broke suddenly into singing a few bars of the Rawhide theme song, he in a startling deep bass, she in a clear alto. Neither of them had seen an episode of the television show before their teens. They had picked up the song from the movie The Blues Brothers. They were of a generation raised not by wolves but by VCRs.
“So their minds can’t really assimilate what they’re seeing, and convince them they’ve seen something else,” Wan continued, as if nothing had happened. “The wonder isn’t that people report seeing so many strange and inexplicable things, but that they see so little of what really goes on.”
“And what would people see a zombi drive as, exactly?” Trey asked.
“Oh, bums on
their way to the
“Tian, that’s not nice,” her brother remonstrated.
“Screw that.” She took a defiant jolt of wine. “Screw political correctness in general. Being Chinese is politically incorrect, unless you’re a failure.”
“Well . . . it’s still not very tactful.”
“Wan, we’re professional ghost hunters. What’s the point of speaking in lame-ass trendy euphemisms?”
He gave her a look. The point (he didn’t say, or have to) was that it probably wasn’t a good plan to risk flipping out the friendly outsiders so they ran screaming to the cops. Thus far the success of the family enterprise had depended heavily on staying invisible to the minions of the law.
There was also, of course, the issue that if the friendly outsiders decided you were too scaly, they wouldn’t go to bed with you.
“That’s really what you do?” asked Missa with new narrow-eyed interest. “I know you let Trey in on some of the joke. He’s been about to bust for weeks, knowing stuff he can’t tell me.”
“Our business cards would read, ‘destructive hauntings dispelled,’ ” Wan said.
“If we had business cards,” added Tian.
“There’s money in that?” Missa asked.
“Oh, very much yes,” said Wan. “For one thing, a lot more destructive haunting goes on than generally gets reported. It’s the sort of thing people usually aren’t too keen to make public.”
“We’re very discreet professionally,” Tian said. She showed Trey a big wide smile. “If not always in other areas of our lives.”
Missa cocked her head, which made her look more falcon-like than ever. “All right. But what does this – ” She waved a blue-mittened hand at the blue-faced corpses now hop-hop-hopping away down the asphalt bunny trail, “ – have to do with your family enterprise?”
“Nothing directly,” Wan said. “We think Dad met Ling in the course of researching ghosts and traditional Chinese approaches thereto, back in the late Seventies when he was getting ready to go into the business. They got to be pals.”
“Plus Ling does some of our sutras and assorted charms for us,” Tian added. “Your traditional Taoist necromancer knows a lot of useful things.”
Missa held up both hands as if to catch a basketball aimed at her face. “All right. I am now at the point where smoke is about to come out of my head. If I ask anything else, just kill me, OK?”
“Speaking of cops,” said Trey, still mulling over what the citizens might make of the corpse drive going right up the street in broad moon, not to mention street, light, “shouldn’t we be getting down from here? Or at least keep it down a little?”
“No worries,” Wan told him. “The owners know us. We de-gaussed the shop for them a couple of years ago.”
“ ‘De-gaussed’?”
“Toasted ghosts,” Tian said. “Ghost-chaser jargon. One way of looking at spirit manifestations is as self-sustaining electromagnetic phenomena. Which they are.”
“You can even construct a model in which that’s all they are,” said Wan. “Just sort of will-o’-the-wisps or ball lightning. Nothing paranormal involved at all, at all.”
“Is that how you think of them?” Missa asked.
“Not on your life,” said Tian.
#
But in the morning Ling the Necromancer did not join their father, Dr. Frank Wu, for the customary cup o’ steaming Joe and bowl of chile-marinated cattle guts. Instead Dr. Wu, seated in his powered wheelchair sipping his first cup of the day, looked up and out the Sanitary Tortilla Factory’s tall steamed-up windows to see his countryman gesticulating wildly at him from the sidewalk.
Wu drove the
chair to the front door, which a trim-bearded elderly white man coming in with
a copy of the
“My corpses!” the necromancer exclaimed, unmindful of how heads turned in the restaurant (and how heads did.) “Somebody’s stolen them!”
#
Wu and Tian surveyed the interior of the derelict storefront. They had erred slightly telling Missa and Trey that Ling cached his corpses in a warehouse. It was the south-end unit of a miniature strip mall in fading, flaking fake adobe, east across the street from all the actual warehouses.
“It’s certainly empty,” Tian said.
It wasn’t exactly. The twelve plastic containers Ling had used in lieu of coffins lay strewn about, the dry ice intended to keep the bodies cool long returned to air. Necromancer Ling had dropped by to look in on them on his way to meet Dr. Wu from the massage parlor where he had passed a putatively diverting night. It was purely prudent reflex, since it wasn’t as if his charges were going anywhere.
Except they had.
“I’m not sure I want to know what these crates were really intended for,” Tian said. Her nose kept twitching. This stretch of Broadway was still light-industrial, and there was a peculiar sweet smell to the air, like bubble-gum with an unidentifiable chemical taint. “Tupperware coffins?”
“Stock tanks, of all things,” said Wan, studying the label stuck to the bottom of an overturned tub. “From Costco. Looks as if he duct-taped garbage bags over them to seal them.”
“Frugal, is our Necromancer Ling,” said Tian.
Her brother turned to the Doctor, whose chair sat in the open door, melodramatically silhouetted against the bright if not particularly effectual January sunlight. “This isn’t really our line of work, Dad. We’re not detectives.”
“Has Necromancer Ling thought about calling Missing Persons?” Tian asked.
“I suppose it is too late to begin instilling proper respect for your elders in you,” their father said crisply. Though he had been born in the People’s Republic his English was immaculate, almost without accent. Dr. Wu was nothing if not anal. “So I must appeal to whatever compassion your generation of spoiled American youth might be able to muster. If Master Ling fails to recover his clients, he will at the very least suffer disgrace. Also, he has agreed to pay.”
Wan looked at his sister and sighed pale mist. “Where do you suggest we start?”
“By using your brains,” their father said waspishly. “For instance: how do you think the corpses got out of the store?” Other than out the back door, which they had already discovered the intruder or intruders had popped with a wrecking bar, the real-world lockpick of choice.
“Well, it isn’t easy to envision somebody tossing them over their shoulder and schlepping them out to a truck in the alley one stiff at a time,” Wan said.
“No blood stains or spare body parts,” Tian said, “so they weren’t snagged by standard numbnuts vandals or burglars, who wouldn’t know not to screw with the sutras.”
“The obvious inference being they got up and left under their own power.”
“Which means another necromancer rustled them.”
Wan hoisted an eyebrow at his sister. “ ‘Rustled’ them?”
“What other word would you use? Ling’s a corpse wrangler. He got ripped off by a corpse rustler. It’s the Wild West. Yippee-ki-yay.”
“So now you engage in at least in a semblance of thought,” their father said.
“Great,” Tian said. “All we have to do now is trot back to the van, grab the Yellow Pages and look under Necromancers. Then we’ll have our list of suspects.”
#
The back alley, as was usual in this part of town, wasn’t even nominally paved: just graded dirt which, as was also usual in this part of town, was a nasty refractory hardpan called caliche. While about as easy to dig as Portland cement it did tend to weather into dust. There were plenty of prints indicating that a number of people had moved the short distance south to the crossing side-street on foot. Whether walking or hopping the twins couldn’t tell. Observant they were. Trackers they weren’t.
At the alley mouth, beneath a greyish swatch on a brown adobe wall where graffiti had recently been painted out, the tracks tracked left. The twins straightened and turned as one to peer the way they pointed.
“Toward the mountains?” Wan said. The cliffs of the Sandias
loomed like a blue-grey wall above the city scattered so carelessly along the
“Freeway’s in the way,” pointed out his twin. The hiss of traffic running north and south along I-25 a quarter mile distant was clearly audible. “Only so many places to cross.”
Wan’s cell phone rang. He answered it, spoke briefly, tucked it back in its holster on his belt.
“Who was that?” Tian asked. She was staring glumly down the block. The Broadway industrial park was mere veneer, a strip running between the alley and the railroad tracks a couple hundred yards to the west. Eastward lay established neighborhoods, green and well-shaded by local standards, when the trees had leaves, anyway.
“Trey. He wondered how things turned out with the corpse drive.”
“What did you tell him?”
Wan shrugged. “The truth.”
Tian frowned. “You sure that was wise?”
“No. But we’re bringing them both in on our operation anyway. What can it hurt? It might even be of some use – he said Missa knows some people who live in the area.”
“Great,” Tian said without conviction.
The phone rang again. Wan spoke even more curtly and snapped the instrument pointedly shut.
“Dad, huh.”
He nodded.
“Complaining about having to wait in the van, huh.”
Wan nodded again.
So they returned
to the van. Wan drove up way north on
#
“We found your stiffs,” Tian said. She had her forearm on the checkered tablecloth, her chin down on it, and was pitchforking up salsa from a dark brown crockery bowl with tostadas and shoving it in her mouth in a languid fashion.
Their father
frowned at them. His birth name was Wu
Yun-biao. Upon coming to
Now-Dr. Frank Wu’s eyes swam a little woozily behind his thick heavy-framed glasses. There were four dead Margarita soldiers on the table plus two walking wounded. The twins didn’t care to guess how many casualties had already been removed from the battlefield.
“You are disrespectful of your elders, young lady,” the scientist said sternly.
Tian traced the ideogram for Red Dragon on the tablecloth in water condensed from her glass. “Yep. Don’t you want to know where?”
“Of course, of course,” Necromancer Ling said hastily. Proper comportment was essential, but finding his wayward corpses was paramount.
“The cemetery,”
said Wan. He had his sturdy wood chair
turned sideways so he could rest his left elbow on the back. His knees were crossed. In his black jeans and black jacket over
black shirt, Western style but not far from traditional Chinese dress, he looked
like
“I wish you wouldn’t sit like that,” his sister told him. “It makes you look like Oscar Wilde.”
“Well, aside from the fact I’m thin, straight, and Chinese.”
“Oscar was thin for a while. When he was young. Never Chinese that I’m aware.”
The two old men were staring at the twins with cocktail-onion eyes. “What?” Tian said.
Her dad sputtered like a lawnmower trying to catch. “Are you making fun of us?”
Tian raised a brow at her brother. “Are we? Maybe it’s gotten to be so little challenge I don’t even notice any more.”
Wan uncrossed his legs, turned his chair right way to, and folded his hands on the table before him. “What do you mean, Father?” he asked with Confucian earnestness.
“You know what I mean! ‘The cemetery,’ indeed. A likely story.”
Both twins stared at him. Necromancer Ling cackled and kept repeating, “The cemetery – the cemetery,” to himself in Cantonese. He seemed to have struck a rich vein of humor in the phrase.
“Isn’t that a customary repository for dead people? I humbly beseech your elder wisdom,” Tian said.
“These are not just any dead people,” Ling announced. “They are gyonsi.”
“Well, they’re down for a dirt nap now,” said Wan. There were limits to his Confucian guilt.
“How well do they keep when they’re not on ice?” Tian wanted to know.
Their father was glaring from one to another. Either he could not compound the depths of his offsprings’ perfidy or he’d lost track of the conversation and was faking it.
Ling had sobered pretty much completely. “Do you mean to say they are actually buried in a graveyard?”
“That’s right,” Tian said. “Go figure, huh?”
“The air is cool, the earth is cooler. They should keep a day or two at least.” He adjusted his wingless spectacles on his button nose and peered at them intently. “How did you find them? Which cemetery?”
“The old
“You remember we saw the prints turn east,” Wan said. “And we mentioned at the time there weren’t many paths across I-25.”
“
“Mixing metaphors, sis. Wouldn’t it be a herd, if they’re rustled?”
“Stay on-topic for me, Wan. We finally parked the van on Edith and went inside. The southern section is older, not so well-to-do. Didn’t find anything up front, so we headed toward the back, east up the little hill that overlooks the freeway. The graves get older and barer and weirder the farther up and back you go.”
“Except we found some new ones,” Wan said, unable to avoid a trace of smugness. “Twelve mounds of fresh-turned earth.”
“We figure the perp brought some shovels and got the stiffs to dig their own graves,” Tian said. “He knew how to herd ’em, and obviously he knows how to make ’em work.”
Necromancer Ling tried to jump to his feet. It was beyond his advanced state of arthritis and inebriation. He got to about half-mast and stuck tight between table and chair.
“But we must go at once! We must recover my corpses!”
“Hold your horses,” Tian said, and –
“Please calm yourself, master,” said Wan in Cantonese.
“But. But,” said Necromancer Ling. Dr. Wu watched all with a detached interest, like an attendee at a sporting event he wasn’t a huge fan of.
“We can’t,” Tian said.
“But we must!”
Dr. Wu patted his friend’s silk-sleeved arm lightly. “Sit down, my friend. The twins are rebellious and undisciplined, but they seldom say things totally without reason.”
“That’s the nicest thing you’ve said about us in weeks, Dad,” Tian said as Ling sorted himself back into his chair. “Maybe ever.”
“It’s a public cemetery,” Wan said quickly, before the conversation began brawling its way down another side alley. “Lots of people visiting, especially on a fine day like this. There are houses right across Edith.”
“Plus
“But I must get them back! The train comes soon! The New Year comes soon!”
“Relax, Necromancer,” Tian said. “They aren’t going anywhere.”
“That’s what I told myself,” the Necromancer said, “last night before I went to visit my ladies.”
“Touché,” Wan said. “But nobody else can disinter them by day for the same reasons we can’t. We’ll have to wait until well after dark to mount our rescue.”
“Why so late?” their father demanded.
“This time of year, when the sun goes down rush hour’s just getting going,” Wan pointed out. “Then there’s plenty of traffic until nine or ten. People heading downtown to hit the bars.”
“The freeway’s not so much a problem,” Tian said. “Drivers are going fast enough they won’t see us unless we build a bonfire. But we should probably also wait until at least eleven so that the people in the apartments are all in bed watching Conan instead of peering out the window looking for Satanic rituals.”
Ling made a funny squealing sound in his throat. Dr. Wu, who had begun to track the here-and-now somewhat better, murmured to him soothingly in Cantonese.
“Very well,” the Necromancer said at length with a nod. “We cannot afford the intercession of the authorities. If we must wait, we must.”
“That’s the spirit,” Tian said.
“Now,” Master Ling said, “there are certain things which must be understood. First, you must not disfigure the corpses in any way.”
“Say what?” Tian said.
“Don’t use such sloppy language!” her father said. The twins ignored him.
“You mustn’t harm the corpses,” the Necromancer Ling said with exaggerated precision. “At least not significantly. They must be presentable for burial.”
“So if one of them tries to gnaw our heads off, we can’t just blow off his,” Tian said.
Ling waggled parchment-skinned hands in terror. “No! No! That is the last thing you must do. Not only must they not be mutilated, they must be able to hop. How can they hop if they have no head? Impossible they should hop without a head.”
The twins sat and stared at him through the afternoon gloom. The lunch rush had subsided; they enjoyed a booth in the first dining hall, with its dark ceiling-vigas seeming to hang low overhead, in virtual solitude.
“You must understand, children,” their father said, “perhaps the one thing on Earth more stringent than the Triads’ interpretation of their contracts, is their approach to enforcing them.”
“And they contracted for twelve stiffs a-hopping,” Wan said.
Ling bobbed his head. “Just so,” he said. “And one more thing.”
“One more thing?” Tian exclaimed, rearing back. “Why is there always ‘one more thing?’ ”
“Let’s hope it’s the last ‘one more thing,’ ” her brother said.
“Oh, it is, it is,” the necromancer said, nodding eagerly. “One of the relicts is that of a sorcerer who was also a powerful necromancer – one of my colleagues, as it were, although lamentably he lacked the scruples of a gentleman, and dabbled in the most malignant arts.”
“An evil magician,” Tian said. “This just keeps getting better and better.”
“His name was Xa Xe. He liked to be called ‘the Golden Scorpion.’ ”
“You can just tell he was a people person,” said Wan.
“He was a prominent if shadowy figure among the Chinese laborers in the West,” Ling said. “A forest of rumors grew up around his name. One of the most persistent is that he was assassinated by agents of the Dowager Empress at the time of the Celestial Fist Rising. My researches, however, proved his demise to be less melodramatic, if still not precisely prosaic.”
“In short,” Dr.
Wu said, “Ling discovered that he actually died of a stroke in a cathouse in
“They let Chinese
into bordellos in
“They did if they had as much gold to spend as Xa Xe,” their father said.
Ling folded his hands piously. “Sad to say, unscrupulous and even malignant sorcery often brings substantial monetary reward.”
“So this Golden
Scorpion had enough loot to get his ashes hauled, but not all the way back to
“You are very disrespectful of the dead, young miss!” Ling said briskly.
“I’m disrepectful of everybody.”
“Alas,” the necromancer said. “As a member of the underworld, he was compelled to employ assistants of less than sterling honesty. On learning of his death they looted his belongings, most particularly the gold, and decamped. He was forced to undergo the indignity of interment as a pauper in Potter’s Field.” Ling shivered in an ecstasy of horror at the thought of a gentleman, even such a one as to call himself Golden Scorpion, suffering such a fate – among white devils, no less.
“Contrary to
“One must consort with low persons,” Ling agreed.
“Another popular culture lie exposed,” Tian said. “I’m so shattered.”
“Master Ling,” Wan said, “I’m kind of getting the feeling here, and set me straight if I’m wrong, that you’re not sharing this charming vignette with us just to help us better understand the rich history of the Chinese people here in the American West?”
It was the old men’s turn to trade glances.
“Well, actually,“ their father said, “no.”
“Xa Xe’s spirit remains exceptionally powerful. The spark of life-essence burns more strongly in Xa Xe’s lich than all the rest combined.” Ling hesitated. “He may therefore be capable of escaping the control of all but the most potent and experienced necromancer.”
“So our nameless corpse rustler might get rustled in turn by one of the very corpses he rustled,” Wan said. “Sartor resartus.”
Ling nodded. “Possessed by Xa Xe. Although I do not believe Xa Xe strong enough to do so. Yet.”
“I’m happy,” Wan said. He looked around at his twin. “Are you happy?”
“A mig’s a mig, Wan,” Tian said, employing family slang derived from her attempts to pronounce the term malignant spirit at the age of three. “He gets crosswise with us, we follow SOP: kick his ass, take his name, drink our beer.”
Ling started to flutter up toward the big round roofbeams. “You must not speak so!” he shrilled through his pinched old nostrils. “You must not take lightly the menace of the Golden Scorpion!"
“Wasn’t that a Doc Savage title?” Tian asked.
“I’m with the Necromancer on this one, sis,” Wan said. “We’re talking a very powerful member of the dead, here. Who’s currently at large.”
Tian conceded with a sigh: “And ready to take charge.”
She pushed back from the table. “Let’s hit the highway, bro. You old guys gonna be all right here for a while?”
“Where are you going?” their father demanded.
“To do some
research,” Wan said. “We’re not the only ones looking to dig up Master Ling’s
lost little gyonsi. Whoever swiped them did not plant them up
He stood up. “It might be helpful to have an idea of who the competition is.”
#
“Zombis,” repeated Stuart the noted connection. “Funny you should bring up zombis just now.”
It was early
night on
“You’re a laugh riot as usual, Stu LaNu,” Tian said. Stuart had thus far successfully resisted the best attempts of the Albuquerque Police Department and other organs of officialdom to elicit his last name. His profuse arrest record, which he would show you on demand or if you didn’t refuse quickly or emphatically enough, listed him as “Stuart LNU,” for Last Name Unknown. Tian, naturally, took things a step too far.
Stuart for his part was never sure what to make of Tian Wu. He wasn’t the only one.
“You came to the
right place,” Stu said. “If it has to do with bizarre subcultures in the
greater
He flicked his
bulbous blue eyes down to the far end of downtown and back. It wasn’t a long throw.
This worked. Despite the temperature the street was thronged this night as most nights with the mostly white, mostly affluent, and mostly young, in search of brewskis and their concomitants.
“ – by odd coincidence, the dude I bet is the very one you’re looking for happens to be in a line of work similar to my own, if you catch my drift. Or was.”
“But you’ve got to be mysterious about it,” Tian said.
Stuart smiled blandly. “Naturally. Part of the perks. After all, you came to me. How many purveyors of fine recreational pharmeceuticals-cum-PhDs in sociology can you name?”
If they ticked down their list of potential informants – and indeed they had – the twins would have hit on Stu LaNu first in their discreet inquiries into possible corpse rustlers. But Stuart only came out at night. Their other contacts, meanwhile, had come up dry.
“None with your charming personality,” Wanshang said.
“Well, there you go. Now, as I hinted earlier it’s funny you should come to me at this point in time asking about a crim with an interest in zombs.”
“Go easy on all the dope street idiom, Stu,” Tian said. “You’ll lose us. It’s not politically correct for Asian-Americans to be down.”
She elbowed her brother in the short ribs. “Quit watching chubby white Goth-chick butts and pay some attention here, Wanshang. I think Mr. Personality may be getting ready to disgorge some insight.”
Wan gave a last tragically romantic and winsome smile to the trio of plump and pale young dark-clad women (one with hair dyed jet black, one purple, one green) sauntering slowly by, and reluctantly returned his attention to the situation at hand.
In temporary vain. Now Stu was bobbing and weaving and jabbing the air at random like a skinny unathletic white guy who occasionally stumbled onto “Boxing After Dark” on HBO. He interspersed the air-boxing with grinning and waving to what he evidently sized up as a passing covey of potential customers.
He had stationed himself for the evening’s labors on the sidewalk by a vacant lot at downtown’s western extremity, across Central from El Rey Theater, which was throwing a no-alcohol concert of local bands and therefore an attractant for that significant segment of Stu’s customer base which was debarred from the liquor-serving clubs by age and lack of resourcefulness in obtaining false ID. The youngsters avoided him. Most ignored him; others cast him looks of black suspicion.
“Off our game tonight, are we, Stu?” Tian asked sweetly. “You’re doing a swell impression of a narc. Now, recall that we are paying cash on the line here.”
“Huh? Oh.” He flashed her a
quick and patently phony grin. “Yeah, so anyway, back in the Eighties, when Miami Vice ruled the airwaves of
Reagan’s
“What does a Jamaican know about zombis?” Tian
demanded. “Vodoun is mostly Haitian
and speaks French.
“Yes indeed. But don’t forget, my perceptive and sharp-tongued little Chinese spitfire –”
“I’d boot your shins for that, Stu, except I halfway like the sound of it.”
“ – they’re pretty similar. Vodoun, Obeah, Santería, Palo Mayombe, they’re all a mixture of West African religions with Christianity. The Jamaicans, it seems, have their own form of zombi, even if the Haitians get all the ink, what with Wade Davis and all. Our good King Natty, in sum, was into zombis.”
“So he was screwing around with Plan Nine from Outer Space: the reanimation of the dead?” Wan asked.
Stu blinked. “Plan Nine?”
“From Outer Space,” agreed Tian. “That really is what it was, what the movie was about. You know, if you work backwards, maybe Plan One was actually pretty good.”
“It still didn’t work,” her brother pointed out. “Or they’d never have gotten all the way to Ed Wood, Jr. But to return to business before our man Stuart drifts too far out to sea: we have King Natty doing zombi work the way New Agers do angel work. To threaten competitors?”
Tian frowned ferociously. “Don’t tell me he was using the stiffs to package drugs! That would be so made-for-TV.”
“Since, as you so
charmingly remind me, you are paying
for this, I have to tell you: yes. And yes.
The King was using the threat
of zombification to intimidate his rivals.
And street word is he was
experimenting with the undead as a source of cheap labor. Braceros from across the River
Wan held up a sudden hand, reached to his waist with the other. His beeper was evidently buzzing him like a bee in his pocket. “What happened?” Tian asked Stu.
“It didn’t pan out. Maybe the Haitians know something. And the next wave of foreign drug criminals that moved in – I think that was the Russian mafiyas, Part One – didn’t believe in zombification and weren’t scared. Now, if he’d only been able to hold out until the Cubans made the scene. . . .”
Wan stuck his beeper back in its belt carrier beneath his coat. “Missa and Trey are still wondering if we’ve got any leads,” he told Tian in Cantonese. The pair had called periodically throughout the day, to be met with noncommittal responses.
He made no move to call them back now. Instead he waved airily at their informant. “Sorry. Please continue.”
Stu drew breath. “Then the feds started leaning on the King.” He said it as if speaking of Elvis. “The ubiquitous and omniscient they say he spilled his guts, then had to make himself most scarce most rapidly lest his erstwhile associates soak his dreads in gasoline and make one of Winnie Mandela’s favorite kind of sparklers out of him.”
Wan blanched behind his Mad Dogs. “You’re a poet at heart, Stu,” Tian said. “But what does this mean for suffering mankind?”
“He’s back.”
“King Natty.”
Stuart touched the gold ring depending from one pink and blue ear. “So I hear.”
“What’s he up to?”
The dealer shrugged.
“Don’t hold out on us, Stu,” Tian said. “We will hurt you.”
He smirked. “I think I’d like that too much.”
Wan stepped between them. “We’re kind of on a tight schedule here.”
Stuart’s ears perked. They really were almost pointed, in an oval sort of way. “Involving what?”
“Triad biz,” Tian said. Since they could not wholly hide from Stuart the fact that they engaged in some sub rosa occupation, they had long since allowed him to draw the inference they had links to mainland-Chinese gangs.
For once it was literally true.
Stu nodded with immense satisfaction. “You’ll have to tell me all the juicy details.”
“Not a chance,” Wan said. “Later we’ll drop some hints. Now, what is King Natty doing back in Burque?”
Stuart shook his head. “So sad. But I truly do not know.”
#
Dr. Frank Wu disliked getting in and out of his powered wheelchair. It was a custom job, heavier even than a usual power chair, the seat and arms encased in fluffy ivory fleece slipcovers. It had, as he liked to brag, everything but a wet-bar. He had designed it himself – and paid – to make his enforced occupation of it as congenial as possible. He had succeeded so well that he could hardly be dislodged short of bed and the discharge of various bodily functions (he’d contemplated accounting for those too; but the twins resisted.)
He had accordingly gotten some of his contacts from his Los Alamos National Lab days – machinists and welders, or what his offspring thought of as his “non-sinister” cronies – to yank out the van’s left rear seat and install brackets into which his chair’s wheels could be locked once the power-lift had winched him in. The other rear seat had been replaced by more conventional van customizers with a swiveling swoopy pedestal-style chair, suspiciously Sixties In Effect. It was likewise made to be locked into place or removed quickly; when Dr. Wu rode by himself it was stowed behind his wheelchair.
The seat placement served to prevent guests having to clamber across the Doctor to sit. This was not so much out of consideration as the elder Wu’s concern they might jostle him or trample his feet, which were fragile with desuetude. Dr. Frank’s wheelchair mount was itself inset in a turntable, so that he could pivot to face a guest. Or turn the other way to snub him, as occasionally happened, given the nature of Dad, and for that matter, his pals.
Necromancer Ling occupied the non-wheeled seat tonight as Wan drove them south on
Second. He was turning himself around and around on it with his rope-sole slippered feet and tittering fit to bust. He and Dr. Wu had still been at Garduño’s punishing the margs and the chips and salsa when the twins had called and announced that it was showtime.
“Whee,” the ancient Master said. Triads and their nasty bullets behind the ear were the last thing he had on his mind.
It was past
They turned right
again onto Edith, a block from Broadway.
They passed one cemetery, crossed beneath the freeway, and then
Despite what his twin considered his customary exaggerated regard for the State’s law, or at least its minions, Wan switched headlights off and ran with just the amber fogs. At Tian’s direction he rolled down his window, ignoring querulous complaint from the rear. Every fifty or sixty yards they passed a gate through the ornamental iron fence around the cemetery. At the third, where the houses fell back on their right to give way to a little park with a softball diamond, and the graveyard grass looked less manicured and the monuments not quite so monumental, Tian went, “Whoa-whoa-whoa!”
The van stopped. Dr. Wu leaned forward. His eyes seemed huger and more owlish than usual behind his industrial-strength prescription lenses.
“Why we stop?” He spoke by custom excruciatingly correct English, and got his Underoos in a giant wad when the twins so much as used slang. But under the influence of either Master Ling or Sifu Joe Crow he’d started sounding like Warner Oland whenever he wasn’t yammering on in triphammer Canto with the Necromancer.
“Got a hit,” Tian said. “Check the gate.”
Their father squinted out his side window. “I see nothing.”
“Of course you don’t,” Tian said. Normally the twins approved the deep window tinting, which after all kept the idly curious eye from chancing upon some of the more overtly unusual tools of their trade they carried stashed in the back. But now it was a pain, hence Tian’s insistence on Wan rolling his window down and letting in the knife-edged night.
“What do you see, O sharp-eyed one?” Wanshang asked.
“Look close at the lock.” The simple chain securing the iron gate was held by an equally simple lock, of the sort you buy at Wally World – hardly primo security.
But it wasn’t even locked. The hasp was turned around and just hooked through both ends of the chain. To the casual glance, by night anyway, nothing looked wrong.
“We have a winner,” Wan said.
“What’s that?” Dr. Wu leaned forward to demand querulously.
“Somebody’s broken into the cemetery, Dad,” Tian said. “Probably not to loot a fortune in rubies and gold from among Pharaoh’s grave goods.”
“Rubies? Gold?” All those margs had dulled Dr. Wu’s wits, and no surprise. They had taken no edge off his cupidity, though. Necromancer Ling took his sleeve and sorted him out in Cantonese. To the effect of, those disrespectful kids are being facetious again.
Down the block,
just up from
“Easy,” Wan said, albeit frowning as he did. “I know that Yugo. It’s Trey.”
“He drives a Yugo? And here I thought he was attractive.”
“What’s this? Are these friends of yours? You must send them away.”
“Might not be so easy, Pop,” Wan said over his shoulder. “It’s the couple we’ve been trying to talk into setting up our computer network, wiring the house and van. They work cheap.”
It was the right button to push: “Ahh. Cheap is good. . . .” Muttering into his limp collar made their dad sound like David Lo Pan from Big Trouble in Little China. It beat Warner Oland.
“Somebody’s getting out,” Tian said. “At least they’ve got the damn sense to turn the dome light off.”
“Let me talk,” Wan said, shucking out of his shoulder belt. Tian glared at him. “Come on, sis. You know how you are: way too ready to rumble.”
“But somebody’s way past due for a good ass-kicking.”
“And if you can figure out a way to bestow it without rousing the neighborhood,” he said sweetly, “don’t do it anyway.”
He was out the door and it closed behind him before she could snap back. She hated the fact he was as smooth and eel-agile as she. Sometimes.
Wan was pleased to see it was Missa walking toward him. She had the sleeves of her coat pulled over her hands and was flapping her arms in slo-mo before her. The air was cold enough to be chewy and tanged with piñon smoke like some new kind of mint..
“Hi, Missa,” he said softly. Behind her Trey unfolded himself out the Yugo’s driver’s door. “Trey. I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but this is kind of a private party.”
“No way,” Missa said. “You brought us into this. You think you can just tease us and leave us hanging?”
Gears started to
grind in Wan’s head. He liked hearing
her talk that way. Plus she was turning
out to be the fiercely assertive kind. The kind of woman who’d walk all over him, given the chance. And he’d gladly give her that chance, should opportunity
knock. . . .
“You want us to work with you,” Trey pointed out in reasonable tone. “So we need to know how you work.”
Wan stuffed a muted sound out his nose, not quite a snort, not quite a grumble. It was roughly the same line of argument he’d handed his dad. Which didn’t mean he liked being fed it back.
“How did you make us?” Tian’s voice asked from behind. Wan turned his head. She had slipped out of the van and up close without making any noise. It shouldn’t have surprised him from any direction.
Missa gave her a flat look. “Missing dead people. Old cemetery not half a mile away. We get the ‘Duh’ channel on our cable hookup.”
“And it’s not even digital,” Trey added. The others glared.
“I don’t mean to be crass or anything,” Tian said, “but there’s a difference between field work and support. What we do happens to be highly dangerous.”
“We really are professionals,” Wan said. “And we literally have trained for this since we were toddlers. It’s no accident we teach martial arts as cover.”
Trey looked dubious. “Against ghosts with gongfu?”
Wan showed a lopsided grin. “You’d be surprised.”
“My brother doesn’t like to be rude,” Tian said, “but it’s no skin off me. We don’t need to be tripping over amateurs and looking after you if things get nasty.”
“They’re a bunch of hundred year old dead people,” Missa pointed out.
“Didn’t you ever watch any Living Dead movies?”
“I saw that one with Linnea Quigley,” Trey said. “Except I read somewhere she wasn’t really naked in that grave-dancing scene.” He sounded crushed.
“You mean
“Well, in this case, more like cheesy Italian zombi movies,” Wan said.
“HK hoppy-ghost
flicks,” said Tian. “If who we think
has Ling’s stiffs has actually got ’em, he has just about enough sense not to
have gotten in any trouble so far. But
he’s pressing his luck every second.
Screwing around with Chinese hopping ghosts, it’s but a matter of time
before he dislodges the sutra from one’s forehead. And then hell is out for
“If one slips the leash and approaches you,” Wan said, “remember one thing: hold your breath. They can’t see you, but they can smell that.”
Trey and Tian simultaneously demanded to know if that meant Wan had given in. “Do we want to stay out here all night freezing our parts off and arguing?” he returned. “How long before we start shouting and the bad guys hear us? If we’re going to do it, screw it, let’s do it.”
“It may be a fool’s errand, anyway,” Tian said. She and Missa gave each other hard eyes.
“We’re going to pull the van inside the gate and park it so it’ll look like a groundskeeper’s vehicle to passersby,” Wan said. “Then we’ll walk back up the hill to the really old section.”
“Old section?” Trey asked. He was wearing his trenchcoat and knit cap and looking like a floppy puppy.
“Probably old as
the Spanish settlement of
“Back in the late
1800s, early Twentieth Century they brought the people they hanged down by
“Don’t try to freak out the tenderfeet,” Missa said. She had fallen into step with Tian as the shorter woman walked back toward the van.
“No such thing,” Tian said. “It’s true. There are old markers whose dates just happen to match execution warrants on record at the courthouse.”
“If Tian was really trying to scare you guys,” Wan said, “there’s another truth she’d tell you.”
Missa cocked him a skeptical eye. She did it most fetchingly, he thought. “And just what truth might that be?”
“Whether it’s because of the hanged crooks or something else,” Tian said, “plenty of the spirits here are restless. And they display what Walt Whitman called ‘adhesiveness.’ ”
“And that means what?” Missa asked.
“If you don’t watch out,” Wan said evenly, “they follow you home.”
“Holy crap,” said Trey.
#
Tian stayed out breathing steam in the cold while Wan drove the van in through the gates with their spike-tipped bars. She pulled them to behind it, herself, and Trey and Missa, who didn’t look anywhere near as bold now as they had when casting defi at the twins scant moments before.
Tian looped a strand of chain around the gates where they joined and strung it back over itself. Then she hung the lock-hasp – which had been sawed-off with some neatness just above the body – back on a single link, so that it did not join the two chain-ends, and turned it around.
“This way,” she explained, “if we need to make a quick getaway we just hit the gate and off it’ll slide.”
“But it looks locked,” Missa said. “Neat trick.” Her tone was just this side of grudging.
The road headed straight in between leafless trees, flower beds, the neat but winter-brown grass, then curved left after about twenty yards. Wan took the van around the curve, parked it, and got out to rejoin the crew.
Toward the east
and the freeway noise the ground rose and grew barren, until it became a raw
ridgetop showing sparse growths of spiky weeds, twig crosses, and sticks
bearing little square holders for faded death-notices. The sky was clear, the stars sharp and hard
as fragments of broken glass; between their spare uncompromising light and the
light-haze from the
Wan looked to Missa and Trey. Trey’s eyes were huge and his skin ashy-pale beneath his black chin-fuzz. Missa’s face likewise was lighter than normal, and her thin lips had almost disappeared into a line. But her posture spoke defiant determination.
Wan held a long thin finger across his own lips, pointed first to Missa and then to Trey, then down into the shadowed lee of the van, indicating they were to remain here, concealed. Tian drew her finger across her throat.
Wan rolled his eyes.
Tian opened her ski jacket. She wore a Gallagher-pattern shoulder harness with a Ruger GP100 .357 Magnum revolver under her left arm balanced by two speed loaders beneath her right. She drew the weapon, keeping her finger out of the trigger guard and the barrel pointed down and away from the others, undid the cylinder catch with her thumb, swung the cylinder out to confirm there were six undimpled disks of cartridge-heads in place, quietly closed the cylinder again.
Trey’s eyes were really big now. He fell back a step at sight of the handgun. Missa’s brows rose questioningly.
Wan meanwhile had produced a Beretta 92 from inside his own black leather greatcoat. He gently drew back the slide to check the chambering, closed it up again, pulled out a second identical piece from beneath his other arm and went through the same brief routine. As he tucked it away he noticed their companions’ expressions.
He smiled a thin smile and shrugged.
Missa, who now resembled a Rosetti sketch essaying the emotion of skepticism, mouthed the words, for ghosts?
“Some of them,” Wan replied in a low voice. As a child he and Tian had learned from talking to each other after their father decreed lights out that it carried less and was less distinctive than a whisper. “And not only them. It’s a bad old world out there.”
“Not all the migs have passed over,” Tian said. She holstered her revolver decisively. “Yet.”
Trey blinked. His mouth worked. Alternating waves of thrill and scandal coursed blatantly through his skinny body. Manifestly he ached to ask if either of them had ever shot anybody. Equally obviously, he knew asking would only get him quelled, regardless of what the answer he got – or the truth – might be.
With the quiet sure-handedness of long practice the twins opened the van’s rear doors. They hadn’t neglected to shut off the interior lighting either. Wan took out his sword with its tasseled hilt and straight, age-cracked black scabbard, and then a packet of fresh sutras, just in case. His sister meanwhile took out a spear, uncased the short sharpened-leaf tip, then turned it around to check and switch on the cattle prod fixed to the butt with turns of wire and electrical tape.
“Remember,” Necromancer Ling called back, twisting around in his captain’s chair. “Be careful with the corpses. You must show respect for the dead!”
He spoiled the effect by pushing himself around in a circle and giggling wildly again. “Shh!” Tian hissed, and shut the doors shaking her head.
“Old, drunk Chinese guys,” she murmured. “Great. How do I get out of this chickenshit outfit?”
“Forget it,” her brother said. “It’s too late to get adopted.”
“I have to ask,” Missa said, courage bolstered by the twins’ quiet badinage. Her own voice was hoarse with the effort of keeping it down. “Guns and traditional weapons?”
“Ghosts are conservative,” Wan said.
“Like crooks,” his sister added.
Missa pointed. “But that’s a cattle prod, no?”
“It’s a cattle-prod, yes,” Tian said. “Remember, spirits of all kinds are free-floating self-perpetuating energy systems. You can disrupt ’em if you goose ’em right.”
Trey gestured up the hill. “But those – ”
“To all practical purposes are ghosts called back to possess their own former bodies, just as we said last night,” Wan said. “We want to be ready for everything.”
“Now pipe the hell down,” Tian said.
Missa’s eyes flared. Tian leaned forward quickly and kissed her lightly on the cheek. Missa jumped back as if Tian had hit her with the prod. The twins turned and started up the hill.
“That was cold,” Wan said when they were thirty feet away.
Tian’s shoulders shook to the rhythm of suppressed laughter inside her ski jacket. “She’s a well-socialized white girl. She’ll be at least five minutes sorting out the guilt of possible homophobia. Keeping them both out of our hair.”
They piped down themselves then. They moved steadily up the slope, not hurrying, hunched forward more out of reflex than because it might aid concealment. There wasn’t any, to speak of, unless they wanted to belly-crawl among the stones and goatheads, which they did not. At least the moon was at the wrong angle to jacklight them.
Wan stopped. He touched his sister’s arm. She halted as well. The stir of motion ahead had resolved itself into a head, shoulders, and at regular intervals a shovel, pitching dirt. The head wore a long queue and a little cap. The slice of visible face had a blue cast in the dimness.
“He’s got the stiffs digging again?” Tian asked.
Wan shook his head and mouthed, Do I know?
Onwards and upwards they stole. Wan carried his sword undrawn in his right hand. Tian held her spear both-handed, ready to go into action with either end as needed.
As they neared the top the freeway noise grew louder. So did the rhythmic crunch of digging. A murmur came from the far side, not sticking its head far enough above the traffic sibilance for words to be distinguished.
Now the twins went to hands and knees, quadrupeded the rest of the way, and peered over from ten feet to the left of the digging gyonsi.
Four hopping corpses spaded at the sandy soil. Six oblong holes of suggestive size and shape already lay open. Six similarly-dimensioned mounds made a second row. Two of the temporarily reanimated and reconstituted corpses stood to the side, stiffly erect, hands to sides, as if at attention. Sutras, somewhat soil-stained, were visible still pasted to their foreheads.
“Come on, ya heathen duppies,” a tall, lanky man was saying from beneath a mop of thick grey-twined dreads. He stood in the midst of the excavation, gesticulating. “Dig fasta. Ye t’ink we got all night, ya? De sun come up, ye catch a fire, sure.”
Wan and Tian stood up without even glancing at each other. “Or you might catch a fire a tad ahead of schedule,” Wan said. “King Natty, we presume?”
The dreadlocked man turned and stared wildly at them. In an instant his expression shifted to one of peevish impatience, like a mural artist subjected to unwelcome criticism from gawkers.
“Foolish blood clot and China bwa,” he said scornfully, “d’ye t’ink this dread be out here in dis ya boneyard by midnight wit’out he got de Power by him side?”
Tian’s and Wanshang’s eyes swiveled toward one another. A dreadful cold suspicion bloomed within them, congealing quickly into certainty of the presence of a dark and menacing force.
“Freeze, motherfuckers!” a voice screamed.
The twins duly froze.
“
Belatedly the twins noticed another dark van parked down the little ridge’s far side, out of sight from the Edith entrance. Seven men approached from its direction. They wore dark, jackets bulky over body armor, faces obscured by balaclava-style masks save for ovals of eyes and mouths. They all carried guns, which they all duly pointed at Wan and Tian.
“Federal agents,”
announced the possessor of the second voice.
He was obviously the leader, in that he alone wore his baseball cap
right-way forward and no ninja mask. His
face was long, ass-white, slightly concave, narrow, pinched, crabbed and
fanatical, like a
“You’re interfering with a federal investigation!” he barked. “Now lay down those … weapons . . . and get those hands up! I mean it!” He gestured imperatively with his big blocky SIG handgun.
Slowly the twins obeyed. “Christ,” Wanshang said, straightening. “Don’t tell me the FBI actually buys into all that X-Files shit?”
The leader turned back to his brief troop of dismounted Nazgûl, who advanced in little oblique crab-steps with their stubby two-handled MP5K machine pistols shoved out to the extent of the slings looped over their shoulders. “Hear that, boys?” he called. “They think we’re with the Friendly Big Idiot!”
“Heh,” the ninja-masked men laughed. “Heh-heh.” It came out plosively, as if part of a CQB Kill House drill.
One man box-stepped his way up to the ridge crest, paused for nothing evident other than dramatic effect, then leaned forward abruptly to train his weapon down the hill’s front slope.
A yip of startled fear arose from right behind the twins. It sounded suspiciously like Trey.
“Fuck us,” Tian spat.
“We can still hope, if we’re spared,” Wan said. “If they were obedient, would they really be friends of ours?"
“No talking, hear?” snapped a Ninja Mask, who proceeded to wave his MP in both their faces. He appeared to be black from the little swatches of skin they could see through his hood.
Trey and Missa were quickly herded up alongside the twins. “What do we do with them, boss?” the black Ninja asked.
“Hold them until
we finish up here,” the top man said. He
gave Wan and Tian a sidelong inquisitorial smirk. “Then we’ll decide. Agent
“Damn,” the black
Ninja said. “I wish you didn’t give me that code name. My daddy fought in
“Quit your damn bitchin’,” said a Ninja holding down on Trey and Missa, in a Southwestern Latino accent. “When we drew names the first time and yours came up black, you threatened to sue for discrimination, remember? Now get your orange ass in gear.”
“I keep expecting them to start going, ‘Terminate! Terminate!’ ” Tian said.
Trey looked as if he’d just swallowed a frog. “Don’t hold that thought,” Wan said. “Don’t give them ideas.”
“Can’t,” Tian said. “Didn’t bring a hammer and punch.”
“Shut up,” hissed the Latino Ninja.
“Should we pat ’em down, boss?” another asked.
“Why bother?” the maskless man asked, almost bitterly. “They’re just a bunch of stupid kids, out for a night’s irresponsible fun. A night’s unimaginable, unnatural, unspeakable fun in a graveyard, granted.”
“What’re they doing with them funky-ass weapons?” the Latino wanted to know.
“We’re pagans,” Tian said defiantly. “They’re religious objects. Our possession and use of them is protected by the First Amendment.
“Not to mention the Second,” she added from the side of her mouth to her brother, very low.
“Ix-nay,” he said.
At the word pagans the Head Ninja stepped back and crossed himself. Then he laughed. He sounded as robotic as the rest. Maybe the others were just trying to emulate the boss.
“The First Amendment? Hah!”
“Of the Constitution,” Wan offered helpfully.
“Forget it,” his sister said. “They’re feds. Any knowledge they ever had of that’s a suppressed memory now.”
Missa shook her head, behind which she was holding her mittened hands. It made her elbows wag side to side. “You guys are definitely both full-on crazy,” she announced, not without admiration.
Digging obliviously along, the zombis had unearthed a new comrade, fresh not being the right word, somehow. This one was enormously tall and spectrally thin. He was also in significantly worse cosmetic shape than the others, being unusually dessicate and, well, corroded.
“Whoa, Ling’s reconstitution treatment didn’t take on that one,” Wan said.
“It’s Xa Xe,” Tian said. “Bet.”
“Bet what?” her brother asked promptly.
“You guys,” Trey said in desperation. Having the minions of some nameless arm of The Man pointing automatic weapons between his eyes was having a bad effect on his personality.
It didn’t stay nameless for long. The head ninja stepped back and gestured theatrically. “As you’ve no doubt guessed by now, you’ve stumbled across a black operation of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. That can have very serious consequences, my foolish young friends.” He shook his head. “As it is, if I told you any more I’d have to kill you.”
“Might as well, having made that trite pencil-dick joke,” Tian said.
“Jesus,” Trey wailed.
“What’s that?” The head ninja stepped close. “Young lady, do you eat with that mouth?”
“Never you,” Tian said sweetly.
Wan looked past them, and his eyes got big. “Hey, stop that – ”
A white Ninja Boy had approached the giant semi-mummified corpse where the others had led it, hopping with what seemed a certain air of reverence, to stand to one side of the opened graves. He was poking the decayed ribcage with the stubby muzzle of his MP5K.
“Mighty big boy,
ain’tcha,” he said with a
King Natty, obviously grasping the situation, ran forward waving his arms and shouting at the ninja, “Stop dat! Ye don’ mind what ye trifle wit’!”
The Ninja Boy prodded again. The corpse took a step back. “ – to me you don’t look like nothin’ but a long dried-up turd on two corn-dog sticks.”
For emphasize he pushed hard with the weapon. The zombi lurched.
The sutra fluttered down from his forehead, twisting slowly in the air like a long rectangular leaf left over from vanished autumn.
“OK,” Wan said to Missa and Trey, “now you can be scared.”
The tall revenant leaned forward and bit the Ninja Boy on the forehead. The agent screamed as brown teeth tore away a huge patch of black cloth and white skin.
He staggered back, shrieking and dropping his machine pistol to swing by its sling so he could stick both hands up into the waterfall of blood that instantly rushed down his face.
“Bad duppy!” King Natty shouted, hopping and waving his hands in the gyonsi’s face. “Don’t be doing dat, now!”
With astonishing quickness for one so dead the corpse reached out, gathered the Obeah-man in its huge withered hands, reeled him against the meat dried over its ribs. One hand grabbed the top of the King’s skull through his natty dreads and twisted it like a bottle cap.
There came a very loud sound like a treelimb breaking. King Natty’s eyes rolled up in his head, his body jerked spasmodically, and then he went completely limp. Wet-cloth limp.
Dead limp.
Trey gagged, swayed. Missa bit her lip and screwed up her face, but didn’t turn away.
“Now that’s what I call the ungrateful dead,” said Tian.
The tall zombi dropped King Natty.
The Latino Ninja had darted a few steps toward the scene when his buddy was grabbed. Now he cried out, “He’s dead!” and cut loose with an ear-tearing burst from his squat Kraut machine pistol.
Nine-millimeter bullets raked the dry ribcage. They evoked no more than puffs of grave dust.
From the corpse, anyway. The unfortunate agent who’d been bitten was still reeling around trying to hold back the blood torrent with his now gore-soaked black gloves and screaming like a scalded soprano. He blundered into the line of fire as his comrade panic-dumped his entire magazine, waving the MP5K before him like a very loud torch.
Impacts slapped across the wounded agent’s side and chest. He stopped screaming. He dropped to his knees and then slumped over as bonelessly as King Natty had.
Another operator, dancing nearby waiting for a shot past him, cried out, “Shit! They went through his body armor! You killed him!”
“Lopez!” the boss ninja shouted. “I mean, Green – you didn’t load Cyclone rounds in that thing, did you? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what do you think this is, the BATF?”
When the guns began their play Wan and Tian had each grabbed a companion’s sleeve – boy-girl boy-girl – and wedded the weeds. Fortunately it was easy for them all to land with the hill’s bulk between their bodies and the now thoroughly panicked feds.
“Why didn’t you draw your guns?” Missa asked semi-accusingly.
“And have them go
“They seem to be doing pretty well on their own,” Trey observed.
It was hard to hear for all the gunfire going on. Xa Xe’s relict stalked among his previously unearthed comrades plucking sutras loose with curiously dainty flourishes and letting them fall. The nine millimeter bullets did not toss the corpses around the way they do in the movies. The energy they imparted was little enough in any event, added to the fact that, as the ninja boss suspected, most of his merry men had stoked their pieces with the feds-only Cyclone rounds, specially developed to penetrate body armor – such as the operators’ own. Meaning they bored straightaway through dried meat and bone doing little by way of damage.
Still, a very great many caps were being busted and a mighty load of specially-coated lead flung through the air. The twins could just envision the fingers stabbing at phone buttons in the apts across the highway as residents, outraged at being wakened from their long winter’s naps, phoned the cops to complain about those damn Satanists lighting off firecrackers in the cemetery. The blue-faced corpses tottered and, one by one, fell.
The shooting stopped. Magazines had run dry. The silence throbbed in the four spectators’ eardrums, indeed their bones. Xa Xe stood alone, swaying gently, above his fallen comrades.
The Ninja Boss swaggered up to him, SIG in hand. “So you really are a tough guy, huh? Last stiff standing. Well, you’re busted now, pal. Boys, bring those restraints over here. We’re getting one good specimen out of this.”
He turned his head. Xa Xe reached out and plucked the SIG from his fingers. He bent it double and handed it back.
Behind him, the fallen corpses began slowly, slowly, to climb to their feet again.
Xa Xe extended his arms to the sides, awful corrodo palms up, lifted them slowly past his shoulders. Recently-turned earth seemed to boil. Then blue arms with sand crusted on loose sleeves thrust upwards into the night air. Bodies followed, and blue staring faces as the remaining corpses released themselves from earth’s cold embrace on their own recognizance.
The head fed looked from them to the Golden Scorpion looming over him. He dropped his now L-shaped sidearm as if it suddenly glowed white-hot and spun to face his surviving men.
“Run away!” he commanded. They fled en masse toward the van.
The onlookers picked themselves up and helped dust each other off. The twins recovered their archaic weapons.
“Do you think he knew he was quoting The Holy Grail?” Trey asked.
“Nope,” his girlfriend answered. “Dude like that saw a Monty Python movie, he’d vanish in a puff of smoke.” They were very calm about the whole scene now.
Sensory overload does that.
Wan’s cell phone rang. He answered it as the fedvan’s engine fired up. “Hello?”
“Wanshang,” his father’s voice said, “what is going on up there? We heard shooting. Are Master Ling’s corpses safe?”
“Not, ‘are you and your sister safe’?”
“Obviously you are safe, Wanshang, or you would not be answering the phone. That’s called ‘logic;’ did I neglect to teach you? Anyway, you’re the only ones with guns up there, aren’t you?”
“Oh yeah, we just decided to fire off the half-dozen illegal automatic weapons we bought without you knowing and smuggled up here under our coats. We just set up some cans on the gravestones and were plinking, Dad. That’s all.”
Tian took the phone from him. “Allow me, before you say something you’ll wallow in Confucian guilt about forever afterwards. Dad, we had some unexpected company. A bunch of buttholes from some black DARPA outfit. They should be tearing past you for the gate – ” She glanced back toward the entrance. “ – now.”
The van struck
the closed gate so fast that it knocked both wings loose from their hinges
without ever slipping loose Tian’s clever chain arrangement. The gates bounced in the street with musical
twangs as the van heeled left on two wheels, almost lost it, bounced up on the
far sidewalk, then peeled out west on
“Don’t they know the only place to shoot a zombi is in the head?” Missa said.
“You do watch zombi movies,” Wan said approvingly.
“It’s a good
thing they didn’t,” Tian said, lowering
the phone slightly and neglecting to cover it perfectly. “Don’t forget, those
blue guys are the only things between Master Ling and a Triad-sponsored
celestial swim in
“Better ring off, hon,” her brother said. “The zombis’ve lost their sutras and are off the res, and they’re coming this way..”
“Daddy, we’ve got a situation here. Talk to you later. Love you. Bye.”
Wan quirked an eyebrow at her as she pitched the phone back at him. She shrugged. “I get sentimental at the funniest moments,” she said.
“I hate to tell you this,” Missa said, “but they’re, like, circling us.”
They were. Eleven blue-faced figures hopped toward them in a crescent. It was an extremely sinister scene; still, try to imagine the reanimated dead doing anything that doesn’t seem sinister. Just try.
“Time to go to work,” Tian said. “Remember what we told you: if one gets close, hold your breath.”
“I have asthma,” Trey said. His voice already showed a detectable wheeze. He’d had enough stress already without being attacked by the undead.
“Better hit your puffer now,” Tian said.
From the Wu family van drifted the wan distant voice of Master Ling: “Be careful not to damage the corpses, children!”
“We will, Master,” Wan called back. “Relax.”
“Ween,” Tian said. She spun her spear and strode into a low forward posture with the haft tucked beneath her right arm and her left hand extended, palm outward, three fingers curled down, forefinger upraised. It was a hung gar-style block which had come to be used as a salute – as in the movie which had raised them, Big Trouble in Little China. The twins had adopted it as their own.
“God, I love doing that,” she said.
#
“Aren’t you worried about them?” the Necromancer asked as he turned away from the thumps and grunting of combat mortal and im-.
He shut the van door. That way at least he didn’t have to listen.
Dr. Frank Wu shrugged. “Of course. But this is after all what they have trained for. They are young, and strong, and their bodies seethe with growth hormones. We are old men and must save ourselves in order to share our wisdom.”
The van’s insides
were lit in dim amber difficult if not impossible to detect from outside
through the tinted windows. The
illumination pleased the doctor. It
reminded him of the
Neither had he.
“Will you take tea, Master Ling? This conveyance comes equipped with a hot plate with which to make it.” He held up a sliver hip flask. “It also chances I have some Evil Jack with which to fortify it.”
The Necromancer Ling beamed beneath his droopy ’stache and stroked his silky-sparse goatee. “Truly, you are a gentleman!” he exclaimed, in Confucian wise.
#
A blue man slashed at Wan’s face with clawed fingers and surprising speed. Wan bobbed back and left away from the blow. He smelled rancidity. Reconstituted flesh didn’t reek of decay, or at least not decaying human flesh, which he’d had the poor fortune to encounter on several occasions; more like sour milk.
He’d always had a mild phobia about sour milk.
Using the scabbarded sword’s flat as he would the bare blade, he slapped the elbow of the arm that had just missed him, guiding the gyonsi past him to his right. As the creature hopped by he thumbed a yellow sutra spang in the center of its forehead. It stopped as if its plug had been pulled.
“Nothing to it,” he called to his sister.
“You say,” called Tian, engaged by two from opposite directions, one woman, one man. Expressionless as wood, eyes staring like porcelain marbles, and apparently unable to separate knees or ankles, they nonetheless bobbed up and down and side to side with startling alacrity, slashing at the living woman like leopards.
But Tian was herself no slouch in the agility department. Long red tassels tied behind her spearhead whipping, she spun the weapon in a figure eight, blocking and swatting away the blue-skinned limbs that struck at her. The nails were long black claws.
With surprising and possibly fortuitous synchronization the man to her left clawed for her eyes while the woman on Tian’s other side ducked for a grab at her legs.
Tian jumped. Simultaneously she wheeled the spear-haft, whacking the high-striking male gyonsi on the ulna. The female corpse on her right swished air beneath the corrugated soles of her boots. As Tian came down the dead woman snapped erect and launched another of her looping stiff-armed but astonishingly quick attacks.
Tian’s feet touched frozen earth. She kept dropping. She laid her spear down, opening the hand that held it just before it grounded and using her stiffened arm as a pivot for a scything leg-sweep. The female zombi’s legs flew out from under her. She went down, and she went down hard.
Her male counterpart charged. Tian cracked him smartly on the sunken-cheeked face with the spear haft. Then dropping the wood haft onto his shoulder as a brace she ran right up his legs and body.
She topped off her run with a kick beneath his chin and rolled over the top in a backwards cartwheel, rump-long pigtail flying, neat as a cheerleader; which she had surely never been. The corpse staggered back. For reasons unknown it grabbed wildly at its little gazebo hat to keep it from flying off its head.
Landing lightly, Tian darted her right hand into a jacket pocket. Before the gyonsi could regain balance she whipped out and planted a sutra on his forehead. He froze.
And the other corpse, now back on her feet and square behind Tian, lunged for her unprotected back.
Trey shouted warning. Before it left his lips Tian had sprung up and to her right. She lit atop a cross more substantial than most around it, its splintery wood silvered by weather and distant streetlights. As the female zombi stumbled forward, arms clutching air, and whatever flicker of intellect her long-departed spirit had brought along for its enforced temporary sojourn in its body wrestled with the eternal question, Which way did she go, George? Which way did she go?, Tian perched a breathless moment, balancing on one foot as the cross began to sway. Before it toppled she flung herself into a graceful sideways cartwheel which brought her into a crouch close behind the befuddled revenant. She promptly swept its legs again, this time with her spear haft.
The zombi landed on her dead kiester with a thud. As she sat stunned Tian plastered another yellow-paper strip on her head. She stopped, arms half-raised as it rigor mortis had snapped back with a vengeance. Then she subsided into a relaxed pose.
#
Wan had reduced another pair of errant corpses to captivity. Seeing his sister polishing off her two he felt a stab of satisfaction. Five down, seven to go, and the good guys hadn’t suffered a scratch.
“Hello,” Missa said in a slightly strained voice. “A little help, here.”
Forgot about them, Wan thought with a twinge of guilt. Six reanimated corpses, attracted by Trey’s warning cry, had begun to close on the unarmed pair.
“Don’t breathe,” Wan yelled. “Hey you zombis, over here!” He added a couple of Cantonese insults, just in case, and began to run toward them waving his arms. Tian did the same from a different angle.
Three gyonsi immediately pivoted and began hopping toward Wan. Two turned to Tian. And one continued to close on Missa and Trey with ominous intent.
Wan began to twirl his sheathed sword in a figure eight before him: sinawalli, an exercise from the Filipino martial art escrima. Dr. Wu had encouraged his offspring to diversify their martial-arts studies.
The three hopping ghosts ceased to hop. They stood regarding Wan with expressionless intent, arms held stiffly before them. However they perceived his actions, clearly they were having trouble processing them.
He smiled and closed with them.
#
Availing herself of interior lines Tian raced at the zombi approaching from her right, screaming like a horny housecat. The gyonsi raised his arms to strike when she came in range. She whipped up the butt-end of her spear and drove the cattle prod into his chest.
Contact produced a blue spark like an outsized static discharge and a loud crack. Tian’s nostrils filled with the stink of ozone, burning silk, and charred meat. The gyonsi spasmed frantically, jumped in the air like a cat that had been goosed with, well, a cattle prod, and fell to the ground where it lay immobile. It looked dead. More than before.
Tian backpedaled to a halt. “Whoa, that’s maybe a bit too drastic. I wonder if Ling can re-reanimate these dudes.” Fortunately the blue limbs still moved, slightly. She papered him.
Motion caught the corner of her eye. She turned her head.
Black nails tore her cheek.
#
The hopping ghost leaned toward Missa. In life it must have been a well-fleshed man. In its limited reconstitution by Necromancer Ling’s art the skin had been restored but not the fat, so that the jowls hung in blue flag flaps. Its nostrils flared and its chest heaved in a hideous pantomime of sniffing; but no sound of air intake came. The thing could not breathe, but must make do with whatever scent particles happened to drift up its nose.
Realizing this didn’t make Missa Cooper feel much better.
She stood stiff as a light pole. Evidently gyonsi could hear as well as smell, and she wished her heart weren’t beating so loud. Her normally ivory complexion was washed almost transparent, as green around the edges as her examiner was blue through. She clenched her fists until it felt as if the tendons would just bust through the skin on the backs of her hands.
Above all she did not scream.
After what seemed like only an hour or two the zombi leaned back and with a dissatisfied air hopped toward Trey. Missa continued holding her breath. The effort made her squirm, but she held.
Trey rolled his eyes like a frightened horse. His head bobbed from the exertion that kept him from blasting his lungs empty of stale air preparatory to sucking in a fresh blissful inhalation.
The zombi stopped before him. Trey felt as if a giant fist had clamped his lungs and windpipe. He began to thrill with panic that he wouldn’t be able to breathe even after the horror went away – that he was locked in the opisthotonic embrace of the mother of all asthma spasms, and that this was going to be it, one way or another.
Asthmatic since early childhood, he had the suffocation phobia twined deep in his being. Isn’t it better to have your neck broken or throat torn out, a voice rang within his skull, than go through the horror of not being able to breathe? One nightmare dread warred with another.
The gyonsi lost interest. It turned and began to bounce toward Tian, who was shouting and whacking another zombi mightily about the head and shoulders with her spear.
And Trey could hold it no longer. The breath exploded out of him in a half-voiced shout of despair.
#
Wan had managed to sticker another gyonsi into submission and was basically fencing with the other two, fending their blows while looking for an opening to paper them. He heard Trey’s plosive exhalation, followed by Missa’s despairing scream.
Only one thing to do. He hated to do it. But probably not enough. . . .
Gathering himself, he jumped. . . .
Way up.
When he reached apogee at about eleven feet he tucked and rolled. He came down feet first right between the zombi and the warm brains it was intent upon dining on. His back was to the blue-faced corpse. But before the revenant could react he spun and palmed a sutra onto its forehead.
“Thank you,” Trey gasped, and fell wheezing to his knees. Missa knelt instantly to his side. She took the inhaler he’d fumbled out of his pocket, shook it, held it to his mouth and pinched him off a jolt.
She looked up at Wan. The color was already coming back to her face. And then some: pink spots glowed high on her narrow cheeks.
“I don’t what freaks me out worse,” she said, “what almost happened or what did happen. That . . . jump.”
He grinned. “It was all in your mind,” he said.
He turned. The two gyonsi he’d taken unceremonious leave of had finally triangulated on him and were closing, still several paces off. He flowed into a taijiquan sword-form ready stance and waited to receive them.
#
His sister, meanwhile, relentlessly pursued her erstwhile assailant, screaming obscenities and belaboring him with her spear-haft. Perhaps the dead don’t feel pain, but this gyonsi was fleeing the bloody-cheeked young woman as fast as it could hop.
“Careful with the merchandise, sis,” Wan called from his duel. “If you turn that guy into a Chinese piñata, the Triad will not be amused.”
“Fuck the Triad,” Tian snarled. “And fuck you too!” But she stopped.
The zombi continued to flee with startling bounds. She watched him a moment, judging his speed, then ran lightly after him, sprang into the air, somersaulted over his head as Wan had done with the gyonsi menacing Trey, impossibly high. She touched down several paces in front of him. As he tried to stop – not as easy as you’d think, when you’re hopping with your legs together – she went up en pointe, held her spear daintily above her head, and pirouetted like a ballerina. The zombi got himself halted an arm’s length from her – and got a yellow paper tag on his forehead for his pains.
Tian curtsied and bowed.
“Brava,” her brother called. “I’ll clap when I finish off these two.”
“Holy shit,” Tian said. “Where’s Xa Xe?”
“If you mean the big sumbitch,” Missa said, “I think he’s heading for the van.”
The inhumanly tall lich was flat-out striding toward the vehicle. Apparently the motor-control limitations the other zombis suffered didn’t apply to him.
“Sis,” Wan called, papering a sparring partner, “get after him!”
“Blow that,” Tian said. “The old guys left us to sort the rest of these dead dudes out. Let Necromancer Ling impose the rule of law on his opposite number.”
#
Dr. Wu and his old friend the Necromancer had gotten good and uproarious on Jack Daniels Black. The twins, their predicament – even Ling’s imminent doom at the hands of the Triads who had contracted for twelve good corpses and true – had been forgotten in the warm glow of good old ethanol.
Reality, of a most unreal nature, intruded when the van’s side door was yanked open. A blast of stingingly cold air rushed inside, followed by a foul smell and the even fouler visage of Xa Xe, the late if little lamented Golden Scorpion.
The decayed head swiveled side to side. The empty eye sockets fixed upon the Necromancer who, the insulating effects of Evil Jack having abruptly deserted him, was cowering in his swivel chair.
Nothing, not even the seven foot apparition of a zombified black magician, could disturb Dr. Frank Wu’s boozy joviality. Laughing hilariously he rooted around in the lower niches of his power chair, concealed by the thermal blanket he wore over his immobilized legs.
From beneath the fuzzy yellow covering he produced a Taurus Raging Bull, a colossal double-action revolver with a molded underlug that made the eight-inch long barrel seem even huger than it was. It was in .454 Casull caliber, designed for things like hunting grizzly bears. In true Dirty Harry style, it actually was the most powerful production handgun made, just edging the .50 AE Desert Eagle in vehemence.
The good doctor raised the Raging Bull with both hands toward the revenant’s face, hauling back the trigger with both thumbs. It was impossible, but it seemed to Necromancer Ling, peeping between his fingers, that Xa Xe’s eye sockets got wider.
Under most circumstances the noise the .454 round made lighting off was horrific. In the van’s close confines it was an awesome thing. It bulged the sheet metal sides and tinted glass dangerously near to breaking. It squeezed not just eardrums but eyeballs and indeed that rounded box the skull itself until all seemed on the verge of implosion. It was a noise that threatened to squish one’s whole being into a singularity, a downsized black hole.
The effect on Xa
Xe’s skull was spectacularly the opposite.
The soft lead slug hit the thick frontal plate above the brow ridge and squashed, turning into an ugly flattened
polyp of lead. It was still an ugly flat
lead polyp traveling faster than sound, mind.
It shattered to fragments pretty much everything north of the
The zombi movies had it right after all: to take out the dead, shoot ’em in the head. Impossible to hop without head!
The half-headed corpse, now beyond all hope of re-reanimation, fell straightaway back into the cold-hearted night. Dead and truly gone. Dr. Wu cackled wildly in triumph, although neither he nor his cohort could hear a damn thing for the ringing in their ears.
Necromancer Ling burst into tears.
#
“I still can’t believe,” Missa said, her words again coming in clouds, “that there was nothing in the news about that dead fed.”
Once again, weird o’clock in the morning. This commercial rooftop overlooked the
“It’ll turn up,
in one form or another,” Tian said with a shrug. “My guess is, in a few days
the papers’ll report him dead in a shootout down, say,
“Conspiracy?” Trey asked.
“Nope,” Wan said. “Policy. In the real world, conspiracies hardly ever work. You know how hard it is to get people to agree on doing anything, much less carrying out a secret scheme to rule the world.”
“Those ninja bozos won’t spill any beans,” Tian said, “because they’re afraid their bosses will yank their pensions.”
“There we go.” Wan pointed. A crane was swaying a battered and thoroughly nondescript cargo container off the dock, high up into the chill air for the final plunge into the hold, and then a pleasant sea voyage to Mother China.
“Wave at the nice dead people,” Tian said. “They’re going home.”
“And so’s our pal Necromancer Ling,” her brother said. “With twelve hopping corpses, as contracted.”
“I wonder,” Missa
said musingly, “how old King Natty’s gonna like
THE END
Victor Milán