Armageddon Outta Here - The World of Skulduggery Pleasant (20 page)

The zombie had only just got to its feet when Hayley swung, and Tane had to admire her proficiency. The only way to kill a zombie is the tried and true – destroy the brain or sever the head – and where Tane would have chopped and hacked and made an unholy mess of it, one swipe was all it took for Hayley to get the job done. The head hit the ground and the body crumpled, and she glanced back at him and her eyes widened.

“Look out!”

Tane twisted just as the mausoleum door burst open and the zombies staggered in. He scrambled up as they poured through the doorway, a seemingly endless parade of decomposing corpses, moaning and snarling in that guttural way of theirs.

He pushed at the air and a few zombies went stumbling back, but he’d be the first one to admit that he wasn’t the best Elemental the world had ever seen. Hayley was doing better, jumping and flipping and taking off heads, but there were just too many of them. Enclosed space. Outnumbered. Nowhere to run.

“This is bad,” he said to Hayley as they backed up to the edge of the pit.

“Yes, it is…”

“OK, listen,” he said. “I’ve got a plan. You run at them, do that jumping-around thing you like to do so much, let them eat you, and I’ll try to escape.”

“Good plan.”

“Thank you.”

“Or how about
you
run at them,” said Hayley, “do that standing-around thing
you
like to do so much, let them eat
you
, and I just stay and watch?”

“I think I prefer my idea.”

They were doomed. There was no way out. The zombies were closing in. Tane looked at Hayley. So much he wanted to tell her. So much he wanted to say. And then they heard a voice behind them.

“Thought I told you to stay
away
from the flesh-eating zombies from beyond the grave?”

They whirled as a skeleton in a mud-stained suit and a seventeen-year-old Irish girl with blood-matted hair climbed from the pit. Skulduggery held a wooden staff and Valkyrie threw him a headpiece carved from stone. He fixed it to the staff, then held it up for the zombies to see.

The shuffling stopped. The moaning stopped. They stared, transfixed.

“Hear me,” Skulduggery said loudly. “You are the Doherty clan, the last of the great families. You have been cursed to an un-death, cursed to never know peace because of the sins of one man, centuries ago. That man, your ancestor, has now been punished. I have seen to it myself. The curse is lifted. This staff belonged to the one who cursed you. It is yours to destroy.”

Skulduggery stepped back, held the staff over the pit they had just emerged from, and let it go. A moment passed where nothing happened and then, as one, the zombies lurched forward. Skulduggery and Hayley went one way and Valkyrie and Tane went the other, parting so that they wouldn’t be caught in the surging mass of bodies that started to topple into the hole. Like lemmings they went, albeit uglier and smellier, without even a murmur as the darkness swallowed them. When the last of them disappeared into the pit, the pit itself closed over, and so was neither a hole nor a pit any longer.

“Told you we wouldn’t need the amulet,” Tane said, wiping the dust from his combats.

“How did you do it?” Hayley asked Skulduggery as he checked his pocket watch. “What’s down there? What happened?”

“Assorted things,” Skulduggery said as he led the way to the door.

“We’ve got to kind of hurry a little bit,” Valkyrie said, walking after him.

“But how did you lift the curse?” Hayley asked. “How did you punish their ancestor?”

Skulduggery was already out the door, but Valkyrie hesitated just as she was about to leave, and turned. “He lied. We didn’t lift the curse. We didn’t punish anyone. We stole the staff to get the zombies to go away. And if we’re not out of this graveyard by the stroke of midnight, in exactly seventy seconds, we will inherit the curse. Providing the Hound doesn’t kill us first.”

The Hound. So it was
dog,
not bog, and certainly not log. Tane remembered it now. The Hound was the spectral guardian of the curse on the Doherty family, and it was meant to be very, very mean. Feeling pretty chuffed with himself that he had managed to remember that much, Tane spoke up.

“So how big is it, this Hound? Big as a German Shepherd?”

Skulduggery stepped back inside the mausoleum, and nodded to just over Tane’s shoulder, said, “Oh, it’s about as big as that one,” and Tane looked back.

The Hound stood where the pit had been. It was huge and scarred and ravaged and it was sniffing at the ground and pawing at the earth. And then it looked up at them with fiery red eyes and its hackles rose and it growled, and Tane felt very strongly that they should be running away now.

They bolted from the crypt. As they sprinted over people’s graves, Tane could hear Hayley hissing apologies. He felt no such remorse. He’d run across a thousand graves if it meant delaying his entry into one of them.

The Hound burst through the mausoleum door, taking it from its hinges, but it hit the gate and for a moment it stalled, unable to find a way past. It solved its dilemma by leaping clean over the rust-tipped spikes, and landed on the far side in a crouch, its muscles rippling beneath the welts and the fur.

The road outside the cemetery was ahead. They were halfway there when the Hound caught sight of them and gave chase. Tane started laughing, one of his nervous reactions when being pursued. Skulduggery and Valkyrie and Hayley were ahead – if the Hound was going to pounce on anyone, Tane knew it was going to pounce on him. He was unlucky that way, always had been.

He didn’t dare look back. He didn’t need to. He could hear the Hound gaining on him. It was all over. He thought it had been all over before, in the crypt, but he had been premature. Now,
now
it was all over. His life, snatched away, extinguished like a candle in the wind, like in that song, ‘Candle in the Wind’. And then Tane tripped and fell on his face and the Hound passed right over him, snapping at the space where his head had been.

Strewth, bro, that was lucky,
a chirpy little voice in the back of his mind piped up.

The Hound landed and skidded on the gravel but snapped its body around, eyes fixed on Tane, saliva dripping from its bared fangs. Its body tensed, coiled, prepared to spring. One lunge would be all it took to close the distance between them, and Tane, lying belly-down on the ground, was in no position to even try to escape.

The chirpy little voice wasn’t saying much of anything now.

There was shouting. Valkyrie and Hayley were at the very edge of the cemetery, calling out to the Hound and hurling stones. One of the stones, probably hurled by Hayley, hit Tane, but he didn’t utter a sound. The beast snarled and reluctantly shifted its stare, snapping its jaws in the direction of the other two.

And then Skulduggery came darting out, waving his arms, and the Hound took a single step towards him and Tane kept his head down, didn’t move an inch, and proved to be such an uninteresting target that the Hound quickly switched focus. It leaped for Skulduggery and Tane scrambled up and ran straight at Hayley. As he ran he saw Skulduggery sprint for a large Celtic cross, made from stone and standing as a proud testament to some dead guy’s life. Right before he ran straight into it, Skulduggery turned his body sideways and let his momentum carry him forwards. His shoulder collided with the cross and he spun and hit the ground, but the Hound hit it head-on.

Tane noticed something approaching from in front of him and realised it was Valkyrie, but she was standing still, and in fact it was he that was moving. He crashed into her and they tumbled back over the low wall and sprawled on to the road in a mass of flailing limbs and cursing. It was mostly Valkyrie cursing. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Skulduggery running for them, the Hound, having recovered, right behind him. Skulduggery dived out of the cemetery and the Hound leaped after him and then kind of faded into nothing, like the air had come and whipped it away. Skulduggery landed and rolled and was on his feet again, checked that the Hound was gone, and then looked down at Tane and Valkyrie.

“Having fun?”

Valkyrie hit Tane and got up.

“Is it over?” Hayley asked, looking around warily.

“It’s over,” said Skulduggery, straightening his tie. “Stroke of midnight, so it was in the nick of time, but when isn’t it for us?”

“Always in the nick of time,” Valkyrie mumbled. “Why can’t we ever solve a problem
early
?”

Skulduggery tilted his head at her. “Where’s the fun in that?”

Hayley peered at Tane. “You OK down there?”

“A dog tried to eat me,” Tane said, not getting up.

“If it’s any consolation,” Skulduggery told him, “it tried to eat me, too.”

“Yeah, that’s no consolation at all.”

“I need a shower,” Valkyrie said. “I’m covered in gore and zombie guck, and I don’t want to get on the plane reeking. It’s a long flight back to Ireland.”

“Was this your first trip to Australia?” Hayley asked her, suddenly all friendly now that the threat was averted. Bloody typical, that.

“No, but it was definitely my goriest. Are you sure your friend is OK?”

Hayley scowled down at Tane. “He’s not really my friend. He’s just an idiot that I know.”

“She loves me,” Tane whispered. The others talked a bit more, discussed this and that, but Tane stayed on the ground and didn’t join in. He was alive. He was alive and he was going to stay alive, and he was going to enjoy living again. He suddenly had a mad urge for fishnchups. He poked his head up. “Anyone hungry?”

“I don’t eat, I’m afraid,” Skulduggery said, “and we really have to get going.”

Valkyrie smiled. “Thanks for the offer, though.”

Hayley looked at him and sighed. “Fine,” she said, “I’ll go get some grub with you. But you better not talk to me.”

He grinned, and Hayley helped him up.

This story is dedicated to cover artist extraordinaire, Tom Percival.

For most people, the cover is the reason they pick up a book in the first place. The amount of correspondence I get proves this, as people go on and on about how the cover caught their eye, made them want to read about a skeleton detective, how the covers are the best things ever, how the covers blah blah blah…

I think it’s a generally agreed upon fact that I could draw the covers if I really wanted to. I have the raw talent, I have the eye, and I have that one year of art college under my belt.

And I think Tom knows this, which is why he pushes himself to excel each and every time, why he pushes himself to make these books stand out from the others on the shelf. The threat I pose is important. The threat I pose is a good motivator.

Keep pushing yourself, Tom. My time is coming.

P.S. You’re welcome.

he man with the unfortunate face stood in the aisle between the Science Fiction section and Crime, and he seemed to be trying to blend in with the bookshelves. He wasn’t doing a particularly good job of it. When an old woman shuffled too close, he snarled at her – actually
snarled
– and the old woman yelped like an injured puppy and hurried away as fast as her little old legs would carry her. People weren’t used to snarling, not in a public library. For as long as he’d been coming here, Ryan certainly hadn’t witnessed any snarling. Until today, of course.