Dead Boys (32 page)

The baby was stomping her guts into disarray, sending an unwelcome vibration through her bones. Her whole body shook as she walked through the darkness.

Was she really going to rob this poor boy?

Course she was. She’d hustle first and kick herself later. That’s how things were down here. That’s how they’d been up there.

One drink. She just had to get him through one drink, and it would all be worth it.

The bar was even busier than when she’d left it. “Late again,” croaked her boss as she took the bucket from the boy’s hands and carried it with the other behind the bar. “And customers lined up, waiting.” He peered into the buckets. “Is this it?”

Clarissa watched the boy shining his beam wildly around the faces of the drunkards, who goggled back at him, amazed at his gadget. She motioned him over, away from any of the lowlives eager to claim him for their own. “The boy’s got something more valuable than the slops he spilled. Give it a minute, I’ll pry it loose.”

Her boss grunted. “You’re better at bullshiting than running for swill.”

“Do you mind? I owe Slim here a drink.”

The barman sucked his teeth and turned his back, looking sidelong at the flashlight. Whatever happened, he’d still turn a profit.

“You’ve had a long day,” Clarissa said, shoving a mug in front of the boy. “Let Ma take the edge off.”

The boy tucked his nose in and took a sip. Clarissa watched him drink. The whole room was watching as his light flickered, wondering if the batteries would win the race with his mortis.

It would still be a good haul, even without the batteries, Clarissa told herself, though her spirits had sunk.

“Shall we have it again then?” came a voice from over the boy’s shoulder.

“Ad infinitum!” cried another.

“And a-one, and a-two, and a—”

Three corpses were standing on a rickety table, assailing Clarissa’s ears with an underworld drinking song. Though tuneless, their rendition had rhythm on its side, and within moments the entire bar was churning to the beat. Clarissa, annoyed by their antics, absently refilled the boy’s mug and was surprised to find him with his head on the bar, giggling helplessly.

“You all right there, honey?” she said, surprised at the uncommon looseness his body displayed when he lifted his head. “Looks like that drink hit you pretty hard.”

“You have no idea,” he said, pulling the mug from her hands more quickly than she’d have thought possible, “how that drink hit me.” He shone his light under his face. “I’m aglow with inspiration!” he cried, then tipped the mug into his mouth.

The effects of this second drink on his body were like nothing she’d seen in the Tunnels, and she wondered if she’d judged him wrong. Could a boy as fresh as this already have gone through his mortis? He seemed to be speeding up when he ought to be slowing down.

The flashlight was glowing yellow now. She could kiss those batteries goodbye, but at this rate she wasn’t even sure she’d get a crack at his tunic.

He stumbled into the crowd, where after a while she spotted him teaching the singers a new song. The place was soon stomping and howling along, and she was too busy pouring drinks to keep an eye on him. “Win some, lose some,” she muttered, and then the boy hopped right up on a tabletop, howling at the top of his lungs:

The drunkards were in ecstasy. Half-f mugs of swill soared through the air, bodies lurched in a grotesque parody of dance, puddles were stomped into fountains, and above it all the boy waved his hands in the air like a conductor, weeping with laughter.

Clarissa stared at his face. He must have splashed swill in his eyes, but it looked for all the world like tears.

The boy was down in the crowd now, and his lyrics rang out in a muddle, trampled under the stomping of feet, the beating of mugs, the slamming of chairs on tables. The crowd pitched and heaved; every now and then a reveler tumbled to the floor, shouting the song from below, oblivious to the blows his sodden body absorbed.

“They’ll tear the place apart,” said Clarissa.

“We’ll have to weather the storm,” said her boss, opening up a drawer beneath the bar. A small arsenal was stashed inside. “Take your pick, but I’d recommend a knife.”

Suddenly the beam of the torch shot out of the crowd, bouncing across the floor. Clarissa ducked under the bar and picked it up, clicking it off before the batteries were gone altogether; then the crowd went still all at once, and the only sound was a single voice, rising and falling in pain and fear. It was the boy, crying out from the center of the mob, where he’d fallen hard from a tabletop, the insistent, unnatural rhythm of his breath sending a chill through her bones.

Breath
?

The baby bucked so hard it ripped her belly open. A tiny foot split the skin, straining against the fabric of her dress. Too shocked to process the rupture, she shoved her hand against the sole hard enough to force it inside, then elbowed through the drunkards, jockeying for a glimpse.

Breath
.

The boy sat rocking on the floor, his chest rapidly rising and falling, his hand clamped to his forehead, where blood poured out of him, thinned by moonshine, a sticky, bright, impossible rivulet mingling with the swill on the floor.

“Bl—bluh—”

“
Can’t
be.”

“What else?”

She could have stepped in. They always listened when she yelled. But this boy had heat in his veins while her baby was dead and cold. Where was the justice in that? Why should anybody be allowed to breathe when her sweet child never had, never could?

Clarissa didn’t speak, didn’t move. She just stared.

“Is it?”

“It is!”

“Blood?”

“Can’t be!”

Disbelieving, one among them started to peel back his skin, slowly, just to see what would happen. Then, hearing the shout at what he’d seen, what he’d
felt
, the others crowded closer. One by one, they lowered their hands. Rough, sharp-tipped fingers dug into the boy’s sides, making fists around his flesh, pulling harder. Every gobbet came as a surprise.

The drunkards were hollering now, but the boy was louder. The screams spilling out of him were like nothing she’d heard, not since her sister had given birth.

“Blood!”

“He’s—still living!”

“A living man!”

“Alive?”

He went quiet, soon enough, but the crowd didn’t.

They were giggling like children digging into a broken piñata.

The seer turned away; she didn’t want to see.

All hundred and one of his killers were singing.

His blood was bright on their faces.

They were singing the song he’d taught them.
Tra-la! Tra-lay
!

But he wasn’t singing along, not any more. He wasn’t alive any more, either—couldn’t be, with so much of him spread around the room. He was shouting, though, trying to drown them out, saying anything that came to mind: multiplication tables, names of relatives, nursery rhymes. But the crowd turned the words back on him, mocking him, shouting him down, and pretty soon he’d switched to a language like nothing she’d ever heard, and his crazy talk kept going on until there was nothing left but his head.

No one would touch it. No one but Clarissa, who pulled it out of its puddle and set it on the empty bar.

The baby thumped, slower now.

“You knew all along,” she whispered to her belly. “Knew what he was. How’d you know that, baby? You can’t even see.”

“There’s an idea,” said her boss from over her shoulder. He pointed at the head. “A crystal ball. One that talks.” He slammed a drink down in front of her. “I think it’s time we put your natural talent for bullshit to use. Apparently a hustle as simple as the Dead City Welcome is beyond your capabilities, but
this
is something you might just have a knack for.”

She stared at him, then down at the murdered boy’s head. It was still yammering on, its eyes landing on the ceiling, the walls, anything but a human face.

“You want me to—”

“Put a cloth on a table. Put the head on the cloth. Put your hands on the head. And pretend that only the head can see the future, and that only
you
can understand the head. We’ll make a fortune. Fifty-fifty.”

It worked. Better than her boss had ever imagined it would. His cut made him rich, but it wasn’t long before she’d bought out her debt, then filled up an account of her own. Inevitably, the two of them had a falling-out, but by then she had enough to buy her own bar.

She didn’t know much about running an establishment, but she learned. Learned how to brew swill, how to bully runners, how to squeeze every last year of credit out of a drunkard’s account. Nor was that the extent of her education.

Slowly, one guess at a time, she learned to comprehend her baby’s kicks and thumps. Discovered that the child had an honest-to-God talent for clairvoyance, one that kept the months flowing into her account. But along with it came a passion for justice that Clarissa was wholly unprepared to handle, and a temper to match.

For it was obvious that the baby was furious, tired of having played the silent partner, of taking part in unsavory business, of swindling good folks along with the bad. She’d learned how disappointed the child could be in her, in what she’d said, in what she’d done, in what she was doing still. Learned that the baby blamed her for making it complicit in any number of nasty endeavors.

Most of all what had happened to that boy.

The severed head learned, too.

Learned to quiet down. To disappear into his dreams.

She envied him that, though it cost her a fortune. What filled her felt like it would never empty, and when Clarissa closed her eyes she had visions of the child disowning its own mother, a passenger fleeing a sinking ship.

It happened suddenly: she knew she couldn’t stand another minute underground, drowning in shame, so she picked Barnabas out of the crowd and handed him the keys to the bar. Then Clarissa turned her back on the Crowded Car and stumbled away, lacking the strength to take one last look at the boy’s head, let alone apologize. She’d climbed up Southheap and set up shop as far from the Tunnels as she could get, but regret followed like a beaten dog on a long chain, just far enough away that she could forget it was there sometimes, only to hear it scratching for food again.

She’d give anything to be quit of it, or so she told herself.

The child told her a finger was as good a start as any.

Six Seekers held the skull of the seventh high.

The company interlaced their skeletal arms, lifting Etienne into the shifting sands, feeding him memories of their own.

Etienne turned from his howling, only for a moment.

In that moment he saw Jacob laughing so hard he snorted, his head against another boy’s chest.

He saw Siham dancing, the bangles on her wrists chiming in time with music that poured from speakers as tall as trees.

He saw Shailesh climbing a branch and peering at a nest full of baby birds.

He saw Remington jumping naked into a creek.

He saw Adam and Eve sitting side-by-side, pointing through an airplane window.

He saw himself, in his chair with his Book.

A moment was enough. He spoke his greeting through the storm.

“That was—heavy,” he said.

“A weight you’ve carried long enough,” said Jacob. “Let the dust bear it now.”

Lowering Etienne’s skull, he followed the others through the storm. There was no need to form a chain and hold on; by now, they were attuned to the glimpses of life and death that rose and rebounded from one another’s bones. The visions began to fade as they left the rock buried behind them, trekking toward the blurry boundary of the storm. From blindness, they passed into static, and from static into the dim, dawning light that shone between the grains.

Jacob stared down at his fleshless feet, watching sand and dust shift between metatarsals. He held up the hand that wasn’t holding Etienne and willed his dust to gather between the bones. While he’d centered on his marrow, he’d felt the motes being scraped from his skeleton by the storm, and kept as many as he could clinging to the bone. Now here they were, forming a tiny trickle of dust, allowing him to dangle one distal phalange an inch from its neighbor.

He still had much to learn, he thought, returning the digit to its proper place and wiggling his fingers before his eyes.

Through their white bars, he was the first to spot the Plainsmen.

Five warriors trod the sands, pitching rocks at the sandstorm.

“Look,” Jacob said, startled by the sound of his voice. The storm was but a whisper now. “Are they lost, do you think?”

“They’re coming from the direction of White City,” said Siham.

By then, the Plainsmen had seen them. With a unified hoot of excitement, they staggered ahead, brandishing clubs and swords.

Even that far-off threat sent a rush through Jacob’s frame. Before he’d decided to react, he was tearing ahead, his talon-like feet pitching sand in the air behind him. The company fell in, their bodies blurring as they skidded in a ring around the warriors.