Vicious Circle

As far as solicitude went, he was getting just a little bit in my face now. I owed the man plenty, but I’ve never liked lectures, sermons, or public health notices. “Don’t worry about it,” I muttered as I headed for the door. “It’s my brother’s car.”

* * *

The sky was darkening fast: too fast for spring. It was like a night that should have drained away a long time ago, but had clogged the sinkholes of eternity and now was backing up into the daylight. Either that, or I’d just slept for longer than I thought.

The front doors of St. Michael’s were still locked and bolted, and so was the lych-gate. That slowed me down for all of twenty seconds: the gate was more of a decorative feature than an actual barrier, and—weak as I still was—it offered me plenty of handholds. My landing on the graveyard side of the wall was a little bumpy, though, and I fell forward onto my hands, skinning them slightly.

I circled round through the graveyard until I could see the back door of the vestry up ahead of me. It was standing ajar. I walked out into the open, heading toward it, but was stopped before I’d gone ten steps by a breathless chuckle. I froze, looking around for the source of it.

There was a man propped up against the cemetery’s farther wall, his head lolling forward on his chest. He had long, lanky hair and he was wearing a stained mac. He looked like a drunk looking for an impromptu urinal on his way home from the boozer, but a second, slightly less cursory glance more or less ruled that out. The stains on the mac were dark, irregular spatters: the dim light didn’t allow me to be certain, but they looked like blood. The side of his skull was smashed in, and one of his arms was dangling uselessly, like a pendulum, swinging slightly from left to right as he shifted his balance.

A zombie—and one who’d been taking a lot less care with his mortal remains than Nicky did.

Some suspicion that I couldn’t quite explain to myself made me veer in his direction. Maybe I recognized him from somewhere. Maybe I just didn’t want to have him at my back as I went into the church.

“You okay there, sport?” I said, conversationally as I approached him. I was rummaging around in my pocket for the myrtle twig, but it wasn’t there. I must have left it on the floor at Imelda’s, where she’d probably have treated it like a dead rat: dustpan and brush, no direct contact, sterilize afterward.

The man lifted his head to stare at me through the one eye he had left. He grinned, too, although it was difficult to see through the tangled thickets of his beard. Yeah. I had him placed now: he was the guy at the mall, who’d shot Juliet through the chest and who she’d then kicked ass-backward through a plate-glass window. Judging by appearances, it hadn’t done him a bit of good.

“When will it come?” the man asked me. His voice was low, and it had a horrible, liquid undertow to it. He grinned, showing shattered teeth like a bamboo pit trap. “When will it be here?”

“Tell me what it is, I’ll give you an ETA,” I offered. “What is it you’re waiting for?”

A shudder went through him. “The thing that ate me,” he muttered, his head sagging again. After a long silence he added, as if to himself, “Got to finish . . . Got to finish the job. Can’t just . . . eat me and then spit me out.”

Torn between pity and nausea, I turned back toward the church door. That was when he came at me.

He was a big man, and he had the advantage over me in weight. He charged into me like a trolley car, ungainly and not even all that fast but pretty much ustoppable. As I fell he came down on top of me, clawing at me with the fingers of his one good hand, laughing deep in his throat as though the whole thing were a huge joke.

I brought my head up fast, ramming it into the bridge of his nose, and I heard the bone snap with a pulpy sound like rotten wood giving way. No blood flowed: he didn’t have a heart to pump it with, and it probably wasn’t liquid anymore in any case.

He got his fingers around my throat and started to squeeze. His head bowed toward me, his mouth working hard as if he wanted to devour me as well as kill me. The sour stench of his decaying flesh hit me, and my head reeled. Starting to panic now, I rolled to the side and swung a fist up into his stomach as hard as I could. He was too heavy to shift, and he didn’t react at all: no functioning nerves, either.

But he only had the one arm that still worked, so my hands were both free. Feeling like a bastard, I groped my way up his face even as my vision started to blur, and put his other eye out with my thumb.