down, but he had to reload every two shots and the things were focusing more on me than on him. I was in danger of being overwhelmed if I couldn’t clear them off faster. I didn’t know what they were going to do to me if they pulled me down, but I didn’t want to find out and I knew Quinton wouldn’t shoot at anything that was within two yards of me.
I shoved the pressing dead back and cleared a temporary circle by making a fast series of sweeping kicks that knocked the nearest ones into the ones behind. I followed up by shoving hard on the Grey with the sharp, concussive thrust I’d learned could disperse a ghost or topple a demon.
The shambling carcasses fell down around me in a circle about eight feet wide. It was nice to know how far and how hard the effect hit, but I didn’t have time to admire it. I tore off my tattered coat and threw it toward Quinton, hoping he’d take the HK and the spare magazines out of the pockets and use those for a while. It didn’t do as much damage as the shotgun, but the 9mm pistol was a lot faster.
There were too many on me to bother trying to see their individual shapes anymore, so I let myself fall into the Grey, concentrating only on the shining skeins of energy that pushed the dead things onward. Knocking them down wasn’t good enough, and I didn’t know if I could push on them from here or not. I needed to break them permanently.
In the mist-world, the zombies looked like tiny blue lightbulbs wrapped in violet clouds that stretched and deformed as the nightmare things staggered forward. The smell was nauseating. I snatched at the nearest light and felt the creature that contained it tear open like rotten fruit. The process was easier in the Grey, but just as exhausting. The creatures still managed to tear my clothes and pull my hair, and there were so many. . . . There had to be a faster way to deal with them....
I forced my way back up the slope toward Quinton, buying time to get a better look at the situation. The things moved slowly, but with the mindless implacability of idiot machines, each one powered by a core of magical impulse and an unreeling tether to the nearest source of power—the lake. So long as there was water, they’d keep coming.
I couldn’t make the lake dry up or set fire to the scraped, hard ground on the hilltop. I’d have to sever their connection to the lake and hope the rain wasn’t enough power on its own. That meant giving up the hill, but not yet.
I kept backing up, stepping out of the Grey so I stayed on top of the land, not risking sinking into it.
Quinton was level with me now, still shooting at the oncoming zombies, but he fired off the last of the HK’s rounds as I watched. He turned his head as he dropped the smoking automatic into one of his own pockets. I couldn’t hear, but I knew what he said: “Out of ammo.”
Hoping he could understand what I was saying in my deafened state, I yelled to him, “Draw them into a cluster uphill. I need to get below them, near the water.”
I had to take them out in one big push if possible—or at least thin their numbers considerably. I wasn’t sure I could gather up the individual threads of energy that pulled from the lake and break them apart, especially not once they’d been bundled together. The combined rope of magic might be too powerful for me to hold and breaking it might not even destroy the power that animated the dead creatures, but it was all I could think of.
Quinton and I fell back together for a few more feet. The undead followed us, packing together into a dense clot of moldering bodies. The rain was slacking off a bit and the zombies seemed a little slower. Maybe there was hope.
Quinton grabbed me and kissed me hard and then spoke against my lips: “Move fast. I don’t want to die.” He pushed me a little and I ducked into the Grey as he started to swing the butt of the shotgun into the head of the nearest dead thing.
I practically tumbled down the slope to the water, sliding through the mist and cold of the Grey as fast as I could, hoping to avoid the horrors clustering around Quinton long enough to get behind them. A few turned, but most concentrated on him.
As I neared the shore, the gleaming threads connecting the undead to their energy source were bright blue in the ghost world. I grabbed the first one I came to and ran along the water’s edge, gathering up as many of the tendrils of colored light as I could. Each one burned with cold that cut into my hands. With each one added, the burn worsened and the racket in my ears grew beyond the ringing caused by the shotgun blasts and into a buzzing howl that rang, not in my ears but in my bones and skull, and riffed through my blood like heroin. Each thread weighed me down, gathering in my arms like fiery lilies from a ghostly bride’s bouquet.
It felt as if the power ran through my arms and into my spine. When I snatched up the last visible line, I had to drop to my knees, but I remembered the way Jin had stood with his toes in the water when he raised the car and I put one foot into the lake.
It was like standing on a live wire. Power flowed up through my limbs, but it didn’t go into the threads I was holding; it just roared through me and throbbed into my head as if my skull were exploding. I yanked on the gathered threads, twisting them hard together, hard enough to break, and then shoved with all my will, one hard, concussive thrust of the power that flowed in me against the taut rope of energy that ran into my arms.
Magic boomed against the surface of the lake so loudly I could feel it in my chest as if someone had slammed an electric pole into a whole orchestra’s worth of bass timpani. Sparks erupted from the lake and it exploded into light that flashed like a mirror in the sun. The rolling sheet of white illumination shot up the hill to Quinton, throwing the shambling dead down like sticks before a hurricane. I could see Quinton drop to the ground and cover his head as it hit.
And it rolled away, leaving the lake black and still, the shore littered with putrefying dead, animal and human. There were no more small blue lamps in purple fog—the lights had gone out.
I crouched, shuddering, on the shore for a few seconds, catching my breath as the broken threads of power faded from my grip and my eyes readjusted to the night.
Rain dripped and pattered lightly on the ground, leaving nothing but ordinary puddles. Even the wild pools of magic that had oozed on the surface like oil were gone, burned away in the outrageous pulse of energy.
Quinton picked himself up and stumbled down the makeshift stair to the water, to me, picking his way as best he could through the swiftly decaying mess that had been an army of animated corpses.
I half expected the ringing deafness in my ears to have magically gone with the flash of energy, but when Quinton tried to say something to me, it sounded as if he were underwater, or as if I were. He gave up and put his arms around me to haul me to my feet, but as soon as he tried to move me, my muscles and joints gave up and dumped me onto the shoreline and into the water.
The icy water of Lake Sutherland made me gasp and thrash, but my movements were feeble. I’d put too much into that last push and I was too weak to help myself. I was also soaked, bloodied, and partially bare from having most of my shirt and sweater ripped away by the claws of undead beasts.
Quinton was only a little better off, but he was able to pull me out of the lake and help me onto the deck of Leung’s house. He put my coat over me and bent down, pressing his lips to my ear to tell me he’d be right back. Then he went away.
I looked over my shivering shoulder at the lake, wondering if there was anyone around to have heard the gun battle. The lake was a dark mirror, streaked here and there with light from the moon as it tore a slit in the clouds for a moment before being sewn back into its shroud of rain. Far across and down to my right, I could see a gold rectangle of electric light from an open door, weirdly magnified by the water as the light fell on it. Then the light narrowed and vanished.
In a moment, the storm door to the deck opened up and Quinton dragged me inside, locking the heavy door behind us.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Quinton, adept at getting what he needed while staying off the grid, had turned the water on, but it wasn’t warm. There was a generator off the kitchen, but it required gasoline and we didn’t have any handy short of a wet slog back out to the Rover. The propane tank for the stove and refrigerator was equally empty. The undead had ripped my clothes, so I was half-naked and I’d lost the packet of yellow silk. I was so cold from exposure, exertion, and the icy water of the lake that I couldn’t stop shivering. But I had mud, blood, and bits
