she’d catch a glimpse of someone ahead in the street, but they were always just stepping out of sight, turning down a side street or hurrying inside a building. The city was full of dead souls, but she hardly saw anyone. They’re all hiding inside, she thought, afraid of their queen and her dogs. And worse. The image of her father covered in snakes flashed into her head and she had to push it out or she knew she’d scream.
Jewels were scattered in the gutter. Diamonds. Rubies. Sapphires. She stopped to pick up some pearls, and when she stood again she saw three black dogs staring at her from the corner. As she started to cross the street away from them, one of the dogs raised its head and snarled. The others turned in her direction, showing their teeth and letting out deep, rumbling growls. Zoe was sure that the way to the beach was down the street where the dogs sat, so she walked a few yards past them, giving them a wide berth, hoping she could circle back and around them. One dog rolled to its feet and loped toward her. The others followed.
Zoe remembered a mean Doberman that one of the neighbors owned when she was a little girl. The first lesson her father had taught her was to never run from a dog. Zoe turned to her right and walked steadily away from the hounds, forcing herself to keep an even, unhurried pace, even as she heard the pack’s snarls getting closer. Her heart felt like it was trying to punch its way out of her chest. She tried to stay calm and breathe through her nose, but she couldn’t get air, so she gulped in lungfuls through her mouth. Could the dogs feel her fear?
Something tugged at the hem of her coat. As it pulled, it growled. Zoe tried to keep walking, but the growling grew louder and the pulling became more insistent. She couldn’t pull back because she was afraid of her ankle giving way and of falling. She knew if she did, the pack would never let her get up again. Zoe did the only thing she could think of. She stopped. To her relief, when she did, the dogs stopped, too. She felt the tension on her coat ease as the one pulling her let go. Then the snarling started again, deep-throated and deadly. The pack was spreading out behind her and moving forward, starting to encircle her.
Zoe stood her ground. She could hardly breathe and her hands shook. As the dogs moved closer they looked bigger than ever, the size of bulls or lions, but she knew that this was just fear playing tricks on her mind. She forced herself to stay still and not run. The dogs growl and let out small choked barks.
“Now or never,” she said. The dogs looked at her. She raised her right hand slowly. When it was chest-high, she threw the pearls she’d picked up as hard as she could. The dogs moved steadily toward her, but then the pearls began to fall, clattering and smashing apart as they hit the street, throwing gleaming shards into the air. The dogs leaped away from Zoe and tore after the rattling jewels. The moment they were gone, Zoe ran around the nearest corner.
The dogs turned as one and headed back for her, heads down, teeth bared. Zoe heard them behind her, barking and snarling. She ran as hard as she could, waiting for the attack, for the feel of the breath being knocked out of her as one leaped onto her back-the sound of the pack closing in on her when she went down. But nothing happened. Zoe stopped running and turned, looking back the way she’d come. Half a block back, the dogs paced impatiently at the entrance to the street. They whined and yelped, but refused to approach. Zoe turned in a slow circle, trying to catch her breath. She couldn’t see much around her. All the gas lamps had been broken and the street was dead black.
She could make out the shapes of three- and four-story small apartment buildings, similar to others in the old quarter. But these buildings were barely standing. Some leaned heavily to one side, threatening to collapse. Others were mere skeletons with open roofs, charred by fire. The desiccated corpse of a black dog was nailed to the door of what might have once been a small church. Zoe stopped and stared in amazement at the sight. Who was crazy enough to kill and display the corpse of one of the queen’s spies for everyone to see? No one was going to come down here. Not unless they had to. She looked back and saw the dogs still pacing at the end of the street. Were they afraid, she wondered, or were they waiting for something? She turned back to the street, and understood instantly why the dogs hadn’t followed her.
“They” shambled onto the street one at a time or in stumbling groups. Zoe knew who they were and Valentine’s words came back to her. “There are souls a lot worse off than me,” he’d said. “The dying dead.”
They crawled from the doorless maws of crumbling buildings, clawed their way from under junked cars; they slipped from open windows and clambered from basements. They were thin beyond belief, less even than walking skeletons. They were sucked dry, empty, like papier-mâché ghosts on Halloween. But their teeth and nails looked hard.
It was too late to turn back. There were more behind her than in front. The souls were slow and she kept moving down the alley. Even on her bad ankle, when they reached for her, she was able to dodge their grasping hands.
As they lumbered out onto the street, the souls called to her. Their voices were barely a whisper. Not, Zoe knew, because they were trying to sneak up on her, but because they hadn’t had a reason to speak for a very long time and their vocal cords had withered to dry reeds.
A woman in a nurse’s uniform grabbed Zoe’s arm. She barely felt it and easily brushed the woman off. It was the same with the others. They were as insubstantial as leaves in a winter wind. But there were a lot of them and she could feel the weight of their numbers begin to press in around her. More souls poured from the buildings up and down the street. Fingers tangled in her hair and pulled at her legs.
A tall man in a rotting tracksuit reached out his snakeskin hand and raked his cracked fingernails down Zoe’s throat. She felt blood where he’d touched her. She punched the man in the chest as hard as she could. Her hand went all the way through him and out his back. She let out a small scream, and when she pulled her arm back, the man flew apart like someone blowing on a dandelion. The souls backed away for a moment, then pressed in against her from every direction.
Zoe punched and kicked her way through the mob. Hands grabbed her coat. Teeth bit into her arms and legs, but she kept lashing out. The zombified souls flew apart around her, filling the air with a choking dust. Far behind her, she could hear the black dogs frantically howling and barking.
At the end of the block, she ran face-first into a chain-link fence. At the bottom was a section of torn links. She fell to her knees and squeezed herself though the small break. She felt dry, crumbling, insect-husk fingers grabbing at her legs. One of her pockets caught on the sharp edge of one link and she had to rip the coat to get free. The dead tried to pull her back through the fence. Chipped teeth, like ivory knives, bit her hands when she grabbed the fence to resist them. A man in a cop uniform tried to crawl under the fence after her. He caught his back on the link that snagged her coat, but it didn’t even slow him. He ripped himself in half down the full length of his back and the two mirror-image pieces of him lay side by side, still grabbing for her. A woman in a bridal gown tried to push her way straight through the fence. Piece by piece, she fell apart, as the metal tore apart her papery skin.
Zoe ran a few yards in the dark, slipped, and rolled halfway down one of the cobbled staircases that led to the canals. Far away in the distance were lights. She limped along the narrow canal walkway until she came to a place where the black water slid under an old library coiled around one of the canal’s docks. She clambered up the side of the embankment until she could see the boardwalk just a few blocks away. She ran toward it as fast as she could, glancing over her shoulder for signs of the dogs or the dying dead. But no one followed her.
There was some kind of street fair going on along the oceanfront boulevard. It seemed like all the inhabitants of Iphigene who had been in hiding were now gathered up and down the length of the boardwalk, pressed tightly together and cheering. They were a ragged mob, red-eyed and worn-looking, like an entire city coming off a three-day bender. Uncertain and overwhelmed, the new arrivals stayed together at the far end of the street, not far from where the buses had let them off. Maybe this was some kind of welcome party, Zoe thought.
