twice. The dead dropped whatever they were doing and stampeded across the plain, converging on their King’s pyramid from every side.
No similar offer of freedom had ever been extended before, not to everybody all at once, not even in the dustiest and most disused corners of any of their memories, and it woke a hunger in the dead for the pleasures of the living world that the realm of Mictlan could no longer contain.
King Caradura, still stranded partway up his own pyramid, saw everyone who ever died pouring toward him across the vast, barren landscape at an unbelievable rate of speed, raising great billowing clouds of grayish dust that hung in the air behind them. The rumble of so many fleshless feet pounding the earth rose to a sustained roar.
The King screamed and sprinted upward as the first wave of skeletons swarmed the pyramid’s base and stairs. He made it back to the summit within a matter of seconds, but while el Rey may have been supernaturally fast, he was nowhere near fast enough to outpace the motivated mass of his subjects. The wave of eager dead caught him and bore him up the last few steps, through the exterior door, and back into his own temple.
Graves and Lia watched all of this in delighted astonishment, from the safety of the pyramid’s small, squared-off rooftop, both of them leaning over its edge to look down between their feet.
Inside the sacrificial chamber, the flood of jubilant skeletons herded their King across his own inner sanctum. He clung to the altar by his fingernails until they yanked him from it, muscling him toward the far door in spite of his violent, clawing struggles and the snarled invectives he hurled at them.
Ingrid Catrina watched it all as it happened, from a safe corner of the room.
King Caradura turned into fleshless Mictlantecuhtli when the dead shoved him across the barrier and out into the first chamber, ahead of them. He had no chance to slow down before the crush of animated bones pushed him through the modern office suite’s main door-the one marked with the name of his favorite avatar and the blood of his human family.
Then he was out in the corridor. Out in the realworld, beyond the Hole in the Sky, where he’d never been before.
Which could only mean that Dexter’s extravagant, extemporaneous experiment had miraculously paid off.
Ingrid Catrina stepped forward to help her fellow skeletons uproot Mictlantecuhtli’s round limestone altar and rumble it out the office door after him, like a massive grinding wheel. She stepped back and stood her ground on the spot where the altar had always been, in the center of the sacred chamber, at the very seat of Mictlan’s authority. The tidal flood of fleeing dead parted easily around her.
“Goodbye, Mickey,” she murmured, and could hardly hear herself over the roar of celebratory noise. “We loved each other as best we could.”
She watched the dead slam their King’s shrouded, skeletal form against the corridor’s far wall, then mash him there with his own rolling altar stone. He couldn’t come back to his realm while Ingrid was standing where the symbol of his purpose belonged. White plaster dust puffed out around his robed bones. Skeletons fought to roll the stone back as more and more of the unbreakable dead jostled out into the hall behind him, crowding the narrow space past its reasonable capacity within a matter of seconds. They hefted the altar up off the floor and used it like a battering ram, grinding Mictlantecuhtli deep into the drywall before the century-old masonry behind it simply shattered from the force and burst open in a shower of brick and plaster.
Ingrid Catrina shaded her bare eyesockets against a wash of brilliant, realworld daylight as the dead leapt through the breach after their former ruler, pouring out of what the old people had always known as the Hole in the Sky.
Mictlantecuhtli’s robe fluttered and snapped as he fell, screaming, and crunched against the cracked blacktop, thirteen stories below. His ancient altar landed on top of him and broke apart into several large pieces.
Skeletons in clothing from every era rained down upon Mictlantecuhtli’s remains, smashing them first to gravel against the pavement, then to powder, and then finally to the dust to which all things are said to return. The durable skeletons themselves landed unharmed and pranced away, out into the streets, elated over the prospect of being free.
Up on the roof of the Temple of Mictlantecuhtli, Graves and Lia continued staring down at the mass exodus taking place not three feet beneath the soles of their shoes.
Fresh droves of skeletons kept coming, pounding up the pyramid’s steps and even climbing its stacked sides, pouring in from every corner of Mictlan’s plain like a blanketing swarm of locusts.
There seemed to be no end to them, from one horizon to the next.
Dexter Graves and Lia Flores looked up and grinned at each other like a pair of delighted children.
The dead partied outside the Silent Tower and all over the rest of the city, badly disrupting the ‘real’ world of natural laws and social habits. They burrowed out of the ground and broke out of crypts, so hungry for the life they’d been denied that they were unable to wait in an orderly line at the door between worlds any longer.
In cemeteries across town, bones boiled out of manicured plots. Mausoleum slots blew open and whirlwinds of ash danced around the memory gardens with unrestrained glee. So many of the dead sought to act on the permission they’d been granted that the inviolable veil between life and death might as well have come unraveled. Los Angeles was the event’s epicenter, but its results were going global, spreading more swiftly than the planet could turn.
Los Muertos went nuts as soon as they were loose, too overwhelmed and overjoyed not to celebrate their liberation. The blue sky above was a miracle to them-even if the bright sun, which was currently facing a different hemisphere, was nowhere to be seen within it. They hardly noticed such a trifling detail as that after having endured the tedium of Mictlan’s never-ending gray for so long. Their raucous behavior freaked out the living (who were having a hard enough time dealing with the improbable daylight as it was). It looked as though a sepulchral spring break had been declared on the streets of LA. The dead were on holiday, and they meant to make the most of every second they had.
On paved avenues that had once been dirt roads,
Many of the living (who were still horribly confused, but starting to get over that first, debilitating shock that always accompanies an experience of the impossible) began recognizing ancestors. Joyous reunions broke out everywhere, in yards and in stores and on streetcorners, as the liberated dead sought out children, grandchildren, or descendents too far down the timeline for anyone to reckon. Even expired pets, cats and dogs by the skeletal score, hurried home to check up on the friends they’d loved so well in life but had to leave behind.
For one moment, unique in all of time (like every other moment, of course), the living and the dead celebrated together, and all of them believed wholeheartedly, if only for a little while, in the glorious future of their kind.
Chapter Fifty-Five
After what felt like well more than an hour Lia and Dexter hopped down from the roof of
