That was probably why I hadn’t spotted him after he whistled, not that it mattered anymore. I whirled and threw myself at the zombies.
It probably would have gotten me shot, too, except that before Lorenzo could pull the trigger, Georgie threw himself against my legs and tackled me. I fell down, and Lorenzo cracked me over the head with the Smith and Wesson. It hurt a lot. Enough to make me stop resisting.
“Georgie’s going to let you go,” Lorenzo said, “and then you’re going to climb down. If you don’t, I swear I really will shoot you.”
Head pounding, I clambered down into the grave. “You want to get inside and close the lid,” Georgie said. “If you don’t, you won’t have any space between you and the dirt.”
“I could still run out of air and suffocate,” I said. “You know that, right?”
He grinned. “Maybe I’m not as different from the old Georgie as I like to think. Blame your friend Timon. And get in the box.”
I pulled up the squeaky, rickety lid, got in the coffin, and closed it again. One of the hinges had corroded away, and it didn’t shut very well. It also had holes in it, which gave me another second or two of light. They also gave me streams of grit and dust when the ground closed over the top of me. I coughed and struggled not to panic. I didn’t
When I got the fear under control, I had to deal with my stomach, at least if I didn’t want to lie there covered in my own puke. The coffin stank as bad as Georgie himself. Not surprising, considering that he’d rested and rotted in it every day for twenty-five years.
It helped when my head stopped throbbing. Then I remembered the new cell phone. Clumsy in the tight space, I dug it out of my pocket and got a lonely, empty feeling when I realized I didn’t know who to call. I didn’t have a number for Timon or the Icarus Hotel. And as far as the rest of the world went, I knew a lot of people, but nobody who’d hop right to it if I claimed I needed him to rush to a cemetery and dig me out of a grave. Oh, and watch out for the zombie who’ll try to stop you.
That left 911. Ordinarily, when you make your living gambling, mostly illegally, you hesitate to call the cops for anything. Timon sure didn’t want them anywhere near his business, and I couldn’t imagine how I was going to explain what had happened to me. But I’d worry about all that after I got out of the hole. I flipped open the phone.
No bars.
Okay, I told myself, okay. The phone wouldn’t work, my physical body was trapped, but I could still spirit- travel. I could fly to Timon and get him to rescue me.
I pictured the lobby of the hotel and wished I was there. I felt a kind of loosening, as ghost me came uncoupled from flesh-and-blood me. I rocketed upward.
For maybe a sixteenth of an inch. Then I felt multiple stabs of pain, from the middle of my forehead down the center of my body, and jerked to a stop. It was like I had invisible spikes sticking in me, nailing my spirit in place, and I’d hurt myself yanking against them.
I remembered the symbols chalked on the coffin lid. They were probably to blame. And if I actually understood anything about magic in general or my own gifts in particular, maybe knowing that would help me.
Come to think of it, maybe it could anyway. If I destroyed the designs, wouldn’t that break their power?
I hooked my fingers in a couple of the holes and pulled with all my strength. I tried not to think about the fact that I was doing my best to tear apart the only thing that was keeping six feet of dirt from pouring down on top of me. I told myself there’d still be a little air to breathe, somehow, someway.
As it turned out, I didn’t find out one way or the other. Not right then. The soggy, decaying wood felt as solid as an up-armored Humvee, not that my buddies and I had actually seen many of those. The same magic that locked my ghost self inside my body was protecting itself against me. I didn’t even end up with any splinters, just stinging spots where I’d rubbed myself raw.
Another wave of fear swept through me. Not for myself, or at least not mainly. I wasn’t having any fun, but I guessed I might have enough air to last until midnight. And even after she’d double-crossed me, I trusted A’marie to dig me up as soon as I no-showed for poker and Timon had to forfeit. But I was scared for Vic.
I told myself that the lord pulling Rhonda’s strings wouldn’t want Vic seriously hurt. Not as long as she was the bait in the trap. But I couldn’t count on a monster thinking the same way I did, and besides, accidents happened. If Vic screamed for help, and a big, mean creature like Gimble or Wotan used too much force to shut her up-
So think, damn it! I was a lord’s champion. In theory, I had magic out the yin-yang. Georgie was just a stinky dead guy with no feet. I should be able to get through or around whatever he put in my way.
Which was what, exactly? Despite Timon’s coaching, I still knew so little about magic that I pretty much had no clue. But it was something meant to hold me in the coffin in at least a couple different ways.
But it didn’t give Georgie any trouble. He’d unzipped the ground and unlocked the box with less effort than it took to pop the top off a beer can.
Possibly that was just because it was his jail and he had the key. But maybe it was because the magic was made to chain down a particular kind of prisoner. Maybe it was made to hold the living but not the dead.
At first, that was an idea that, even if it was true, seemed to lead nowhere. What was I going to do, die and turn into a zombie myself?
Well, maybe. Sort of.
I remembered how Shadow looked in the Egyptian temple. Literally, like a shadow. Not exactly like a ghost, but not like a living person, either. What if I turned into all him, the same way I’d turned into all Red?
I guessed I’d still look like normal me. When I brought Mr. Ka to the surface, nobody said anything about me glowing red. But I hoped Georgie’s hex didn’t see me in the way that a person sees. How could it, when it was just a force, and didn’t have any eyeballs?
I reached inside, found Shadow, and almost flinched away. He felt nasty. But I pumped him up anyway, until he was the only thing inside my skin.
And then I hated everyone.
Mainly, I hated A’marie for tricking and trapping me, and Georgie and Lorenzo for helping her. I had to get out of the grave so I could torture and kill them all.
Then I’d do the same to the other players in the poker game. They’d all tried to hurt me in one way or another. Then I’d get Timon, for bossing me around. And Vic, for dumping me.
And after that, I’d go after everyone else who’d ever messed with me.
I hooked my scraped, bloody fingers back into the holes and tore at the coffin lid again. It still felt solider than it had any right to be, but not as hard and heavy as before. Who knew if I’d really figured out anything about how Georgie’s magic worked? But somehow I’d guessed my way to an answer. The hex was still trying to tie me down, but with Shadow filling me up, suddenly there was a little play in the rope.
Unfortunately, my answer didn’t seem quite as smart when I finally managed to rip a big chunk of coffin lid away from the rest. Then dirt avalanched down into my face just like I’d worried it would.
Forget spirit-traveling to ask Timon or anyone else for help. I only had a minute or two before the dirt smothered me. I clawed and burrowed my way upward.
It helped that the dirt was loose. It also helped that I was Shadow. He didn’t have amazing strength like Red had superhuman energy. But he was a vicious, relentless fighter, and now he was fighting the ground.
One of my hands punched out into air, and then the other. I dug my fingers into grass and soil and dragged my head up into the sunlight. I gasped and coughed for a couple seconds, then finished crawling out, leaving what looked like a big gopher hole behind me.
Georgie had said he was going to stand guard. As I stood up, I looked around for him and imagined his dead slimy flesh in my fingers. It felt good. For all I knew, he knew how to put himself back together like Lorenzo after the human cannonball trick. But even if he did, I’d find a way to rip him to pieces and keep him that way.
Or I thought I would. But then the part of me that wasn’t Shadow woke up. I still felt all that hate, but knew it was sick and wrong. It was also likely to get me killed if I let it hang on now that it had served its purpose.
I struggled to push all the rage and spite away. Shadow shrank back down more reluctantly than Red had. But he did let go, and left me feeling ashamed that he was any part of me.
But before I could even promise myself I’d become a better person, Georgie chimp-walked out of the patch of
