you.'
Clay shook his head. Squire and Eve certainly shared an interesting relationship. He was never quite sure if the two actually despised one another, or it was all some kind of act to deflect attention from the fact that they truly cared for each other.
'Hey, Eve, got a box of native earth in the trunk, why don't you lay in it?' barked Squire.
'Miserable shit,' she grumbled, slumping lower and closing her eyes.
But then again…
'The driving,' Clay said before Squire could launch his second, venom-filled volley. He moved forward in his seat to speak with the hobgoblin. 'How do you manage to actually navigate through this stuff?'
Squire shrugged. 'It's really instinctual,' he said. 'Kind of like traveling the darkness of the shadow paths.' The goblin explained further. 'I can feel where I need to go inside my head. It's weird, and hard to explain.'
The vehicle suddenly banked to the left to avoid something in the middle of the road. Clay got a quick glimpse through the side window as the car sped past. If he wasn't mistaken, it looked to be nothing more than a rotting human torso and head, writhing maggot-like across the center of the road. Yet another of the pathetic things responding to the siren song that drew the dead to the Museum of Fine Arts. Their destination as well.
'You see that?' Squire asked him as he expertly steered the car back to the center of the road.
'Yeah,' Clay answered. He could now see the shapes of other animated corpses shambling through the thick fog of crimson within the road and on either side. Squire managed to avoid them with ease.
We must be getting closer, Clay thought.
'Hey, you know what that guy in the road would be named if he were hung on a wall?' the hobgoblin asked.
Clay wasn't quite sure what the diminutive chauffeur was talking about. 'What?' he asked. 'I'm not sure I…'
'Art,' Squire answered, stifling back a guffaw. 'Get it? His name would be Art. He would be hanging on a wall? Art? It loses a lot if I gotta explain it.'
Graves was sitting in the front seat and now the ghostly figure turned to look at the driver. 'Maybe it would be wise if you just concentrated on your driving and ceased all attempts at humor,' the ghost said coldly, the first words he had spoken since pulling away from the Ferricks' home in Newton.
Squire shook his gourd like head in disgust. 'Jeez, try and lighten the mood a bit, and suddenly I'm treated like the friggin' bastard child of Carrot Top.'
Clay leaned back in his seat, letting the uneasy silence again hold sway over the inside of the car. It was obvious that Graves did not appreciate Squire's attempts at levity, preferring the somber silence. Over years, Clay had seen the different ways in which soldiers prepared themselves for battle; no two warriors doing it in quite the same the way. He'd always preferred a little quiet reflection before the war, reviewing the multitude of shapes that he could possibly manifest in order to combat and defeat the threat he was about to face.
Clay gazed at the back of Graves's head, able to see right through it to the windshield in front of him. He didn't know the adventurer all that well, having worked with him only a handful of times, but he had been a man of science in the days when he was still amongst the living. Clay could only imagine how disconcerting it must have been for the man to be confronted with the existence of the supernatural. How do you prepare for something that you spent your entire living existence believing didn't exist? Clay understood why the spirit would have no patience for Squire's stupid jokes.
'I'm just pulling onto Huntington Ave,' the hobgoblin said from the driver's seat. 'It's only a matter of time now.'
The road had become dense with the reanimated dead, and the chauffeur continued to do as well as could be expected to avoid hitting them, but the closer they got, the harder it was becoming. Clay flinched as the front of the vehicle struck the body of a woman, the impact spraying a shower of a thick, milky fluid across the expanse of windshield.
'Whoa, that's gonna leave a mark,' Squire said beneath his breath, hitting the button to cover the windshield with cleaning fluid before turning on the wiper blades.
Squire dealt with his tensions of the coming conflict with humor. It was something that Clay was familiar with. In an age he now recalled only through the veil of time, he had known a great Sumerian warrior called Atalluk, who would gather his fellow soldiers the night before they were to wage war against their enemies and tell humorous stories about his childhood and his ribald adventures with members of the opposite sex. Clay smiled with the ancient memory. The men loved those tales; the stories helping them to relax, and to relieve the tensions they were most likely experiencing in regard to the approaching combat.
Atalluk had been a gifted warrior, but gifted with wit as well. Clay still carried a certain amount of guilt for killing the Sumerian upon the battlefield, but there had been no choice. It was what he had been paid by the opposing forces to do.
The limousine hit a slow moving cluster of ambling dead, their dried flesh and bones scattering like dusty tenpins. 'Strike!' Squire roared, shaking a gnarled fist in the air under the disapproving gaze of Leonard Graves.
Clay glanced at Eve, who still appeared to be resting. Here was someone that he had fought beside on numerous occasions, who understood and embraced the meaning of calm before the storm. She was a creature of infinite patience, Eve was, and there wasn't another warrior that he would rather have fighting by his side. When it was time to fight, she would be ready. He had no doubts about that.
The dead had become even more numerous. Their horrible faces crowded around to peer into the limousine as it began to slow.
'We're almost there,' Squire said, gunning the engine, plowing through the mass of decaying flesh and bones. 'I want to get you close enough so you're not bogged down. They can be a real pain in the ass, these dead guys.'
The goblin leaned on the horn, as if that would make a difference. 'Outta the way, you stinkin' bags of bones! Can't you see we're trying to get through here?'
Clay felt his respiration gradually begin to increase, the beating of his heart quicken. It was as it always was for him, the response of his body to the battle that was sure to come.
'Are we ready?' he asked.
Graves turned in his seat to look at Clay, his death pale features nearly transparent. 'As set as I'll ever be when dealing with things of this nature,' the ghost said, apparently perturbed that he was again forced to face the facts that he had so vehemently denied in life. Graves drifted up and out of his seat toward the limo ceiling, his head passing through the roof.
'I got your backs,' Squire said, his large, dewy eyes reflected in the surface of the rearview mirror, and he cracked the door on the passenger side, ready to exit.
Clay looked to Eve, the woman scrunched down in her seat, seemingly still in the embrace of sleep.
'This is it, Eve,' he said, reaching to shake her awake.
The woman responded in an instant, gripping his wrist in her powerful grasp before his hand could fall upon her.
'I'm awake,' she told him, and he could see by the look in her deep, dark eyes that she was more than ready for what they were about to face.
'Then let's do what we came here for,' he said, letting go of her wrist and preparing to open his passenger door.
As he did this, he heard the surprising sound of laughter, a pleasant sound, and one that he did not remember hearing too many times before. Clay looked across the back seat to see that Eve was giggling as she too prepared to exit the car.
She must have felt his eyes upon him and turned her head to meet his gaze.
'What's so funny?' he asked, completely in the dark as to what could have tickled her funny bone at that particular moment.
'Yeah,' Squire reiterated, a breathless tension in his voice. Even he did not see any signs of the humorous at the moment. 'What's the joke?'
'Art,' she said and again began to laugh. 'The guy with no arms or legs hanging on the wall. His name would be Art.'
Eve opened her door, stepping out into the billowing crimson mist that hid an army of the dead. 'That's pretty
