After the Baron and Phyllis dodged, the Zombie had stopped deliberately injuring CPUSA soldiers. It wasn’t a kindness but a necessity. For each casualty made after the fight was over, he risked prompting someone to take revenge on the Baron.
While passing through the periphery of the failed ambush, the Zombie had suffered a couple of hysterical assaults from CPUSA members, but he’d yanked their weapons out of their hands and smashed the guns to pieces against the tunnel walls, leaving his victims sobbing and terrified but otherwise unharmed. The walk to the surface had been uneventful. It’d been at street level, coming out of the stairs, where CPUSA had made their move.
This was what the Zombie saw.
A late afternoon breeze blew across the mouth of the subway, a warm layer skating across a colder stagnation, never quite penetrating past the stalwart chill of the earth. Ahead, the afternoon spring sky faded towards the sun like an old robin’s egg, dimming from a soft blue towards a bleached white. The Zombie focused his gaze on the star itself, enjoying his unique capacity to see it as it truly was, through invincible eyes. Glare vanished, revealing a smooth bright disc, only variably flawed with dimmer sunspots.
He stopped to consider them for a moment. There was no rush to save the Baron now; after dodging, d’Holbach would arrive in a temple—neutral ground—likely at the 8th Street Bookstore. Retrieving him would merely take time, of which the Zombie had plenty.
So he idly counted the sunspots, comparing them in his head with yesteryear’s activity. There’d been a cyclical decline this winter, a slow sanding away of the magnetic burrs. He wondered if there’d be visible sunstorms this year, or if it’d remain calm until the next solar cycle.
Boots scuffled on pavement, a warning noise. The Zombie turned, expecting a fight with another mercenary or two. He could’ve reacted faster—he could’ve believed in their competence instead of their desperation. He’d been convinced that they were amateurs to the last. Instead, he was ambushed.
Two men with a blanket-sized, ruffled piece of tin roofing rushed at him, shouting simultaneous wishes: “Flex!” and “Constrict!” The details behind their words were hidden, but they’d become obvious with time.
The Zombie moved too late. He threw out a fist, hoping to punch through, and instead the tin swept about him like plastic wrap, sticking to itself and the Zombie with supernatural ease. CPUSA dropped the edges, and they shut around him under their own force. Constriction followed; the metal folded and crumpled with metallic pings until it squeezed his arms against his sides. He planted his palms against his waist, flexing his elbows outwards—that was the only resistance that he managed before the roofing congealed into its natural, hardened state, leaving him as snug as a cigar in a steel tube. He tried to fall, to shatter his new cage.
With shouts of panic, several mercs rushed to catch him, preventing any crash to the sidewalk. Once controlled, they bore him safely down to the sun-warmed earth. There, the back of his head rested comfortably against concrete, and the assailants revealed themselves, smiling and laughing with desperate relief.
“We did it!” one of them yelled.
“We fucking did it!” echoed another.
It’d been years since anyone had impressed the Zombie with such high-quality wishes. CPUSA’s two best cultists must’ve waited for him, honing their intentions into a weapon so fine that it could cut the Zombie from the world, holding him steady without threatening any injury.
They shouted their success into radios. “We got him! We got him!”
A reply came in Russian. It was Malik, terse and fluent, understood to those in charge.
“It was a long shot, but he was alone,” one of them bragged to another. “So lucky.”
A moment later, a truck pulled up along the curb. Men cried, “Heave!” and they hauled the Zombie into the truck’s bed with two men seated on the wheel wells to watch him. The Zombie’s nose and eyes were still free, but everything else—including his mouth—was wrapped tightly.
“Why isn’t he struggling?” asked one of the two watchers.
“Invincible,” guessed the other.
The Zombie wouldn’t struggle to release himself. It would take a while to break free, and if they noticed any flaws in their wrapping, they’d wish it away. Any escape would best wait until he was alone, able to move and act without any interference.
They drove him down to a marina-berth along the shores of the Hudson, and this time, they unloaded him in silence. They all knew what was coming, and dreaded the facsimile of drowning.
There were several sweat-soaked men on the deck of a fishing vessel, emptying sandbags into a deep wooden coffin. It was a powdered grain, very fine, almost like talcum powder. Carefully, mercs unloaded the Zombie from the truck, carried him over, and laid him down on the layer at the bottom of the coffin, face-up. Quietly, the sailors poured more sand over his chest. The light smell of sulfur and salt filled his nostrils.
“He’s still just sitting there,” one of them said.
“Quiet!” another man ordered.
“It’s creepy.” To the Zombie, “Blink or something.”
The Zombie said nothing. They were already terrified of him, and men with this much experience already knew his Pact with the Baron by heart. Once he was out of this mess, they’d fear him even more so because he didn’t resist. This silence would be remembered as eerie confidence. Nobody would call it resignation to fate. If anything, the speed of his return would increase his reputation.
“Please, I don’t want to pour sand in your eyes,” said a sailor.
The Zombie stared, eyes wide open, at the mouth of the sandbag.
“Get it over with,” said one of the other workers.
Powder cascaded down onto his vision, a brief brown cloud followed by a dark, soft pressure over his open eyeballs. Sand sifted into his nose but stopped a little into his sinuses.
After another minute or so, he felt a wash of cold against his face. They were dumping buckets of river water over the sand to pack it down. He didn’t feel any pain, nor the urge to breathe. He just held his breath, lungs strained to stay full without faltering, without end.
It took another ten minutes for them to fill the coffin to the brim. Then the pine lid came down, and he could hear them jamming down on Yankee screwdrivers. A gentle increase in pressure forced his arms a little tighter, but it equalized soon enough.
The Zombie didn’t struggle yet. On the abyssal canvas of sand, he fantasized about the faces of his captors as he held onto them, sinking together beneath the waves. He would pull each of them screaming into the depths of the Hudson, and bubbles would burst from their mouths like escaping souls. They’d suffered an equal cruelty to this crime, hugged to death while he smiled at them through bright blue seawater.
It was a satisfying distraction, but eventually he grew bored of the fantasy and started recalling scenes from the stories he’d read that day.
The Empire of Women in particular kept coming to mind. It was such a bizarre story, an accidental confession of the author’s deepest desires. Its erotic undertones seeped between the lines, lusting after a world with dominating and aggressive women, who ruled over men.
It entertained the Zombie specifically because it was alien to him.
He couldn’t remember feeling sexually attracted to anyone. Most likely, the wish to become invincible had stolen the capacity from him. It was often said that friendship lived in the mind, but love resided in the soul. In its distant place, his soul couldn’t love anything. Right?
Of course, the Baron speculated otherwise. He believed that the Zombie himself had asked for this eunuch’s life. An evil man had no common morality, yet he wasn’t necessarily an amoral creature; he could live by his own rules, choosing his own standards. Thus to the Zombie, some crimes were unforgivable, and sexual assault ranked highest among them, even now. It was a good theory, and kind. It matched the facts and implied a willful selection among evils, a preference amongst the kinds of suffering in the world.
Regardless, he considered this sci-fi story again. He turned it about in his mind like a gem, fascinated by its psychological facets. The author was desperate and unhappy. He’d written a story about rebellion against domineering women because he was unable to satisfy his lust for them. He’d shared it with the world in an unconscious, hopeless desire to connect with others. In his dreams, a female fan might call him up for a screw. Here in the real world, male fans would titter and masturbate, which the Zombie guessed was a fairly healthy response.
If he hadn’t been trapped under sand, he would’ve smiled at the irony. It’d been published in a magazine aimed at children and teenagers, fans of old adventure stories, yet its deepest themes and meanings were implicitly very adult.
It was maybe two hours later when the diesel engine rumbled into life, pushing out into the middle of the broad river. The Zombie’s coffin shuddered as they shoved it off the back of the boat. He hit the water with a lumpen sploosh, then sank rapidly to the bottom and stopped dead in the silt. The pressure of the Hudson added itself to his burden, but it hardly mattered at this point. The CPUSA had made too many mistakes to hold him for longer than an evening.
Of course, they deserved some credit for their research and technical skills. Given the legends surrounding the Zombie, this had been a genuinely clever idea. No containment would hold the Zombie forever, but several historical examples were known for their extended success, and this one didn’t require any bitumen or volcanism.
Specifically in the 10th century, the aging Emperor Zhenzong of the Song Dynasty had ordered the capture and containment of the Zombie for his support of the Khitans. They’d wrapped him in heavy, enchanted rope, dumped him into a reinforced chest full of powdered sand, and dropped him off a Chinese junk into the South China Sea.
Three and a half years had passed before he was sighted on record again, and by then it was too late to take revenge on Zhenzong, who’d died of disease.
Not that the Zombie actually recalled that experience, but the devil was in the details, and this devil would squirm out of today’s trap, using literal gaps. Whether or not he bothered to kill anyone for this indignity would depend on how long it took to escape. The Zombie fancied that fortune was smiling on everyone tonight.
Their first and foremost mistake was to leave most of his head out of the wrap. Maybe it was an accident, but it was more likely a misguided human instinct. Watching someone suffocate was horrifying. The number of people who could smother a man without qualms were few and far between. They’d even hesitated to douse his eyes in sand.
He didn’t rely on squeamishness, but he took advantage of it whenever he could. Now he’d be able to turn his head slowly, and maintaining the invincibility of his vulnerable neck under these conditions would require some extreme divine intervention.
Second, they’d wrapped him in sheet metal instead of rope. In the short term, it was a safer, smarter method, but it left small amounts of space around his arms and legs, which were mostly filled with water—not sand. This might give him enough physical freedom to really start squirming, and when he was being crushed but had room to move, his invincibility tended to ruin and render materials as hard as stone. Earlier that afternoon, he’d dug through the tunnel collapse like a mole in potting soil. The softer sand would take the hits better than rock, but he could shift until he hit the sides of the container, and once they broke, he’d be free.
Finally, they’d let him hold his breath for hours. While it would’ve been difficult to force the air out of him, enough hits with a sledge would’ve done the work. Now that he was down in the sand, breathing out would be more difficult, but either the air left through his nostrils, or he injured his diaphragm. The outcome would be predictably catastrophic.
One step at a time. He began with twitching. He relaxed, letting the dead weight of the sand and water settle on his skin. It felt like the world was bending in, falling in on him, crushing him, but he was denser still, like neutronium, like some impossible substance dug out of the thick heart of a dead star. When he was maximally pressurized, when everything was fighting to destroy his impossible body, he flexed as hard as he could manage. The world could not deny the will of the gods. He forced it back, however slightly, and the little spaces in the sheet metal were temporarily larger. The Earth would give way to him; he knew it in his bones.
Relax. Flex. Relax. Flex. Again and again. It wasn’t about shattering the box in a single blow. Stunts like kicking through concrete were lucky feats requiring room and repetition. In the worst cases, he could spend minutes hammering at a barrier before his invincibility was processed in a way that annihilated even part of his target. While snugly set in sand, there’d never be a need for such ludicrous, brutal intervention. The gods would only let him worry at the boundaries, briefly imposing impossible stresses before letting the material return to shape. Harder materials took more damage with every bend, and metal was especially sensitive.
Microfractures built up over half an hour. Permanent space grew around his elbows and hands. Now he slightly twisted his arms, barely bent his knees, and forced the coffin to audibly groan with every repetitive shift. Nature wished to pulp his moving flesh, rip his skin to shreds, break his joints and bones. He defied it with joy.
Somewhere along the right arm, the tin sheet ruptured very slightly, and sand flowed in through the gap. This caught his forearm in the sludge, but it made room somewhere else inside the coffin. A cavity was growing, and he could push towards it. It was time to move violently, to turn and break his bindings and force his hand towards the side of the box.
He relaxed again, then twitched and blew his breath out of his nose. The weight of a river refused him. The sand around him abhorred the space. The gods pushed back inexorably, and the sand around his nose bloomed away into a brief cavity of air. In response, the metal on his chest crumpled inwards, structurally unsound.
He breathed the air back in with a healthy helping of sand and water.
The metal wrapping rose on his full chest, then split open along one flank like an overripe fruit. The sand loosened around the fresh break, and his arm shot out about two inches into the mire before it settled, locked into the compressing mass.
That was an improvement. He thought about breathing in more material, but decided against it. The sand and water in his lungs were harmless, and they would eventually disappear into the same abyss as the trash in his belly, but eating or breathing in the contents of the coffin would take days, while he could force his way out in an hour or two at most.
A few more inches waited between his fingertips and the side of the coffin. Twitch by twitch, he could reach the rest of the way. Flex. Push. Flex. Push.
Over and over, the sand shifted around his hand. Eventually, he felt wood scraping against his straining fingertips. It was a splintery pine, swollen with water and soft. He was vaguely aware that the river was ice-cold, that he should’ve been half-dead of hypothermia, but as always, he was comfortable, paradoxically both part of the world yet apart from it.
In his half-shell of metal, he could shift whenever he breathed out. At the end of his right arm, straight fingers were ready to lance open the pine wall. Piercing it would be the easiest step. His arm would be locked in a straight line. He must be stopped, or the pine must give way. Reality had no other options. This was the verge of escape.
He breathed out. The coffin groaned around the bubble of sand, and he jerked his arm outwards, forcing his fingers into the pine. No response yet. He pulled a fraction of an inch back, then shoved forward again, and again. Meanwhile, he breathed in sand and water with each attempt, adding to the void in the coffin and the warping pressures on its walls.
The wood cracked audibly, and adrenaline surged through him, roaring at the sound of progress. Like the first snap of battle, it triggered memories of aggression and spilled blood. The dark nights of the Napoleonic Wars closed around him. Tireless, sleepless, he guarded, and men perished quietly at his hands. The Baron was unaware of the dead left in his wake, and if he’d had his suspicions, he’d kept them graciously to himself. Immoral behavior, the Zombie knew all too well, was tolerated during matters of life and death.
Living was worth any cost, and the Zombie would live forever.
One last thrust of violent intent, and his fingers tore through the wall of the pine coffin in a gush of sand. Following the sudden release of pressure, he flailed, slamming his limbs about wildly, churning everything into a cloud. The coffin disintegrated around him, and he clawed his way out onto the river bed, finally free of his wrappings and his containment.
His jacket had been ripped open by metal edges. It flapped around him like sheets of torn hide. His shoe soles flopped, half-loose and missing their staples. If there were any CPUSA on the berth, he would murder them. Drowning, beating, it didn’t matter. He’d need at least ten minutes to calm down, before this rush dissipated and was subsumed by civilization.
He swam tirelessly to the riverbank, sloshed up out of the water, and before he left the shallows, he blew sandy mud from his nose in two fierce jets, then gasped in a breath for one purpose and one purpose alone. “Fuck you New York!” he shouted at the top of his lungs.
Nobody was waiting to die at the marina-berth. He scraped mud off his tongue and spit a couple of times. The flavor was far too bland. He ripped up a handful of semi-aquatic grass off the shoreline and shoved it in his mouth. The fresh flavor of dark, waxy, astringent stalks flooded over this tongue. He swallowed it, mostly unchewed, stumbled up onto the shore, and peeled off his shoes and socks.
Ruined clothes were awkward, and he wanted to run at a full sprint, up on the balls of his feet. He shook himself like a dog, scattering sheets of water, mud, and debris. It was a beautiful night to be alive, and an even better night to run like a bat out of hell.
So he ran, face to the wind. The lawn, the gravel path, and then concrete walks padded underfoot. Sometimes, these surfaces bore him up, impossibly rigid. Other times, they crumbled into sands and powders beneath him. Always, his feet endured.
He started somewhere in Riverside Park. The small berths for rowing and the natural shore weren’t common in Lower Manhattan. He was rushing across the doorstep to Harlem, almost one hundred blocks away from Greenwich Village, give or take ten.
The air hissed in his ears, dried out his jacket and hair. He vaulted a short chain-link fence and landed without even the slightest noise, momentum swallowed up by a miracle.
By the Zombie’s reckoning, there were two reasons that men didn’t run fast. They couldn’t put much pressure on their limbs, and they almost immediately tired of violent muscular twitching. Neither restriction applied to him.
He’d never clocked it, but he figured he was sprinting at a little over thirty miles per hour. It’d take him ten minutes or so to reach the Garment District. Pedestrians shouted invectives at his passage, swift like a windborne fury. Crazy. Drugged. Unreal. Impossible. What are you running from? Where are you going?
So many of them doubted their eyes at night. Underneath the streetlights, he appeared to move even faster, and passersby would stop and watch him until he vanished into the distance. They were witnessing the passage of a primitive god.
He tried to avoid changing direction too much, but he occasionally turned in broad arcs at intersections, cutting through traffic and eliciting an orchestra of horns.
The buildings rose higher around him as he ran south. It was a cloudy night. Cold air had blown in, a late spring front, not wintry but chilly enough to make the locals wrap in woolen layers. The wind was at his back coming out of the north now. He was reminded of the Mexican natives he’d met in 1909. They’d gotten drunk on fermented corn mash and run marathons through desert canyons. He’d chased after them naked, laughing and singing like a trickster from the barren mountains, occasionally shouting myths in English that they couldn’t understand. He wanted to sing and laugh now, to terrify the locals, but even more so he wanted a touch of anonymity. Until he knew the Baron was safe, nobody should know he was away.
The Garment District was a solid square mile where most of the fashionable clothes in the United States were either designed or produced. He slowed when he recognized the area by its shops and factories and rising offices. There were many bars here as well, but they were nearer to the middle of the district. He only needed to pilfer from the edge.
In the alley behind a row of shops, he found a rear door with a key-locked lever. If the Baron were around, he could’ve wished the lock open, but that wasn’t an option for the Zombie. He wasn’t a man, and he couldn’t carry prestige nor make a wish. If he’d had a paperclip and a screwdriver, he could’ve picked the lock with ease. Barring those possibilities, there was really only one choice. It was easy, not too loud.
He hammered the lever handle with his fist, really bringing his arm down hard. It popped loose after about a dozen strikes, and he wrenched the handle off, pulling out the guts of the tumbler lock. Then he took the end of the lever and used it to pull the latch back out of the jamb.
Most doors only stopped bad behavior because they were physical reminders that society was built on rules. They were barriers, solid expressions of stern disapproval towards any attempt to cross them. But much like a human face, a door couldn’t stop someone who had no regard for the social contract, a heavy tool or two, and the intent to bash things open. Breaking and entering was easy when your hands were as good as a hammer.
He rooted through the shop for a few minutes, swapped off his ruined clothes, and came out well-dressed. He dumped the old clothes in a dumpster out back, closed the door by pushing the latch into place with a finger, and started calmly jogging to break in his new shoes. The work of reluctant gods would ensure this happened quickly.
He’d stolen grey wool pants, a matching belt, and dark brown leather shoes. From the waist down, he was classic and conservative. It was his upper body that defied convention. A light blue dress shirt was worn underneath a bright purple cardigan sweater, the kind that a high schooler might use for a letter jacket. Only the bottom half was buttoned shut. The long, middle V of open chest framed a striped black and blue silk tie, and on his head he bore a grey bowler to match his pants.
These were royal colors intended for rich men who wanted to stand out in a crowd. The price tags on his new clothes had politely requested a fortune. Ruining them would be fun. Not that he wanted to dress like this all the time. He’d change back into a proper navy blue suit whenever they could return to the Biltmore. Tomorrow? A week from now? Hard to say.
Once he was sure the soles would flex without ripping up the shoes, he sprinted again. Likely he wouldn’t be able to find the Baron for many hours yet, but he could make good use of his time while he was in the area and reconnoiter their ultimate destination. 42nd St. ran through the Garment District’s north end. He could follow it towards East River Drive and United Nations Plaza, where Denisov should be waiting for the delivery of the Cat o’ Nine Lives.
Normally, it’d be a tremendous risk to show up at the UN—the very heart of secular power—but anonymity wouldn’t really matter tonight. Anyone who recognized him would already know he’d been thrown into the river, and they wouldn’t dare sic secular authorities on him in such a public location.
To be frank, keeping the occult secret was a universal duty, and the threat of punitive tasks was deeply respected. If the Zombie’s existence were accidentally revealed to the United Nations, the gods might send every cult on the Eastern seaboard after the responsible parties. They’d be happy to enact the divine wrath, likening their actions to karmic retribution. If someone endangered the secrets of the system, the system threatened them in turn.
Of course, the Baron had his own complicated theories about the system of prestige and its natural concealment. According to him, divine punishment was only a secondary cause for secrecy; the first and more important cause was apparently “Malthusian population dynamics.”
His argument went like this. A cultist farmed and consumed prestige like food, and they only inducted others when the population was thin and there were tasks that needed doing. Once the occult population was dense enough, growth petered off quickly because there wasn’t enough prestige to go around, and there was little incentive to continue inducting new members.
The rest of the Baron’s argument followed naturally from these historical and social forces. Even if you convinced a large population that the occult was real, nobody would bother to properly induct most of them. There’d be no benefit to investing the time.
By this logic, divine punishments were best seen as reinforcing existing demographic trends. They were never the source of them.
The Zombie found this all fascinating, even emotionally compelling. He thought about the ways it affected the common man, the economics of it. Scarcity and the involvement of money created a class of occult nobles, and so forth—but this all mattered in the same way that the Zombie enjoyed science-fiction stories. The words moved his body’s heart, but nothing else.
He was ultimately material, tied to the mundane Earth. He could no more partake of prestige than he could crawl through a smoggy Venusian jungle or orbit a distant star in the hull of a flitting starship. It was never his adventure; only someone else’s story.
The Zombie reached United Nations Plaza a few minutes later and circled once around the iron perimeter fence, slowing over a hundred yards to a stop beside the UN Library. The plaza itself was locked behind guard gates and vehicle check-ins, but the UN’s many buildings bordered the civilian streets at several points. The Library facade was three stories of beautifully clean, dark green glass. It connected through corridors to the recently completed Secretariat office building, which was thirty-eight stories of the same shining, almost opaque material. In turn, the Secretariat was mated to the Conference building—home of the Security Council—and lashed by long, low halls to the dome of the General Assembly.
This entire place was their destination. The Zombie was here to understand exactly what it’d take to get the Baron inside without risking interception by an occult enemy.
He walked back towards one corner of the plaza and shook one of the fence posts. They were no more than six inches apart, and each pole was about twice a man’s height and topped with an actual spearhead of painted iron. The Zombie could climb over them, but nobody else would dare risk impaling themselves like a medieval trophy. He could bend the posts to make room for someone to squeeze though, but that’d make a lot of noise and draw attention, and they’d be unlikely to reach Denisov before someone on the grounds arrested them.
Realistically, the Baron would have to arrive by car, which meant handing over IDs to a guard, or he’d have to walk in through a visitor’s gate, which would give CPUSA several chokepoints to monitor for his arrival.
Asking Denisov to meet the Baron somewhere outside the UN would be even less useful—he was under virtual house arrest, and there was nobody to liberate him. Denisov had hired the Baron and Zombie because he had no occult agents of his own, and it was doubtful that his secular staff could help him.
Coming here was the only current solution, and it was a bad one. Any cultists stationed in the UN would be actual Soviets—Malik’s servants, and effectively the enemy. Trying to fight through them would start an international incident, though its absolute scale and nature were obscured from the Zombie. He just knew in his gut that modern governments were bigger and vastly more capable than any occult organization. The money and power that flowed through them could literally end the world, and escaping one would require a cataclysm.
The Baron wouldn’t appreciate international attention. The Zombie wouldn’t appreciate it if it killed his friend. And the world wouldn’t appreciate the consequences that would come for them in the aftermath.
Boots stomped across plaza pavestones. “There!” shouted a man with a Russian accent.
The Zombie peered through the bars of the fence. “The vermin show themselves!” he yelled. Cultists might pull the reins of many major powers, but they were always parasites or symbionts to the secular government, never the state itself.
Malik and two other men were jogging alongside the Library towards him. They looked like they’d run a fair distance for fit men, breathing calmly through their mouths and lightly sweating. The moment someone had sighted the Zombie, they’d probably come running from Denisov’s offices in the Secretariat building.
“Holy hell!” Malik shouted once the Zombie was in earshot. “Are you insane? You run around the plaza like a cheetah, and every night guard throws a fit! They think we sent you to scare them, like some fucking supersoldier program!”
The Zombie grinned. “You’re staying at the UN overnight?”
Malik ran up to the fence and clung to the posts as if they were jail bars. He briefly pressed his wet face into the gap, pulled back as if shocked to confirm the Zombie’s audacity, and wiped his thin mustache with shaking fingers. “You monster! Deluded! Vile! You persist in denying us what we own!” His companions stopped beside him, one a thickly-bearded minder in a black suit, the other a bodyguard with a cleft chin shaved as smooth as glass.
“The Orthodox own the Cat,” the Zombie said idly. “Have you been binging?”
“What’s that?” Malik snapped.
“Cocaine doesn’t calm you down.”
“Pfah. I can’t risk sleeping. No thanks to you!”
The Zombie chuckled. “Are you afraid you’ll go home empty-handed?”
Malik straightened and took a deep breath. “I admit it!” His voice was strained. “This upsets the General Secretary. It upsets me. Do you think the Christian psychopaths running the Orthodox cult are going to rest on the Cat? They won’t, and they can’t run a government. Once they have the Cat, the Bolshevik faction is dead—murdered, all of us—but you don’t care! Why should you, you ignorant pig? You make the mistakes today, and our state topples tomorrow!” He was beginning to shout. “We bind the Warsaw Pact together! It is our peace! Communist peace! The peasants are free from nobles, from petty tyranny! Without us, Eastern Europe will shatter! We will be dragged into another ‘Great Patriotic War!’” His voice dripped with disdain for the term, but the arc of his high was still rising. He jabbed a finger between the fence posts. “You want to stop a nuclear war? Hand the Cat over to us! We’ll end this fucking war, we’ll take care of your fucking Langley! We’ll tear down your High Oracles and your Boss Tweed and then the real threat will be dead, all of it! We’ll be able to lock the Apples in a box and forget about them. Forget about the gods. Forget about this hell-cursed prestige. Forget, forget, forget!”
“You can’t bury everything.” The Zombie grinned as he scratched the inside of his ear. “I’ll still be here—the eternal reminder.”
Malik spat on the sidewalk. “Of course you are, of course! No box can hold you. Fucking myths! The only legend here is that you can be stopped. You’re a juggernaut, yes? Engine of destruction! I curse you for crushing dreams beneath your wheels!”
The Zombie leaned forward very slightly. “What if I rolled over this place, Malik?”
The man reeled in shock, then rolled back forward in a fury. “I would kill the Baron!”
The minders immediately began shouting at Malik in Russian. The thickly-bearded one grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him. Malik began shouting back.
The Zombie raised his hand. “Don’t worry, boys! He won’t do it.”
They couldn’t understand his English, but Malik shook off the minders’ grip and scowled at the Zombie. “You can’t assault the United Nations. It’s the dream of world government. Would you oppose that? Would you? They’d demand your heads!”
“They’re welcome to try,” the Zombie replied, but his focus was on gauging the height of the fence. It wasn’t much compared to the walls and ramparts of the Old World, but gunpowder had long made the threat of retaliation into the best defense, and bombs had redoubled the irrelevancy of physical barriers. Much like doors, fences only had to be tall enough to discourage a man, not truly block him. They had to be a symbol of law, and crossing them must be trespassing. That was the most one could ask for—often enough.
The Zombie was different. He grabbed the bars of the fence with both hands, gave them a shake, and found them incredibly sturdy. Solid metal, reassuring.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Malik asked. His voice was even, but his eyes bulged alongside a vein in his temple.
The Zombie wouldn’t easily damage the bars. With only his arms, he reached high and tested his grip. The painted surface wasn’t slippery when dry, and he didn’t sweat.
“Don’t do it,” Malik warned. “Stay there!”
The invincible man pulled himself up with only his arms, hanging his entire weight from one limb at a time, lifting himself with ease. Smoothly, he scaled the fence.
“Jesus Christ, you fucking—” Malik stopped and slapped the clean-shaven guard on the chest. “Get on the phone! Keep this under control!”
The Zombie grabbed two sharpened spearpoints with his fingers, one in each hand, and hung from the top of the fence, grinning down at Malik.
The guard complained in Russian. Malik shouted back, then in English, “I’m in charge!” The guard sprinted off for the door, accidentally bumping into a steel trash can with his hip.
“Am I your guest?” the Zombie asked.
“Get down from there!” Malik shouted.
The Zombie yanked as fast as possible, slinging his body up and over the fence in a lazy half-flip. Malik cursed in Russian, covered his head, and ducked away.
The Zombie limply struck the plaza bricks like a side of beef.
Malik and the minder flinched like they’d expected a bomb to go off under him.
The invincible man laughed gaily from the ground. He stood up quickly and dusted himself off, though it was a cursory brushing.
“What do you want?” Malik asked him, glowering.
The thickly-bearded minder said something in Russian, including the name d’Holbach.
Malik nodded. “He says you must control yourself. The Baron would ask you to.”
“He would,” the Zombie agreed. “But I’m not a creature of choice, you know that. I’m a machine of impulses, a deterministic mind. You’ll make the environment in which I behave, so show me. Prove to me that I can’t walk in here with the Cat.”
“You?” Malik’s tone was a demand.
“Forget the teenager. Forget the Baron. With enough prestige, anyone can be healed remotely, but I can carry the Cat in the palm of my hand. What stops me?”
“Is this a trick question?” Malik’s disdain was palpable. “The Baron survives by your protection. If you ram the Cat in the door, I wouldn’t even have to threaten him. There are a hundred New Yorkers who remember Salem, and they’d die to spill his blood, if not for your senseless Pact. Turn your back? They will have him!”
The Zombie rolled his eyes. “The Baron would follow me.”
“His arrest should be enough of a threat.”
“Show me,” the Zombie insisted, “and be prompt. I haven’t threatened you; I haven’t intimidated you; I haven’t even leered at you. This is the nicest I’ll ever be, so show me.”
Malik glanced at his minder, asking a brief question in Russian.
“Da,” the minder said, “this way.”
“You’re our guest,” Malik hissed, overemphasizing the S. “Act like it, eh?”
“I’m a gentleman in a gentle world,” the Zombie replied playfully. “Lead on.”
They walked to the door of the UN Library, but Malik paused with his fingers on the handle. “Do you have an ID?”
The Zombie shrugged. “A driver’s license under a dead man’s name. It’s soaking wet.”
“In your wallet though?”
“Sure.”
“The guard post is just inside. If he asks, flash it, then shut the wallet.” Malik opened the door, and the Russians stepped through ahead of the Zombie. Malik’s bodyguard was standing there arguing with an American official in a black suit.
“Is that the Chinese acrobat?” the American guard drawled in a thick southern accent.
Malik was quick on the draw. “Have you explained this yet?” he shouted at his Russian bodyguard.
“Sir…” the American began.
Malik marched up to the guard’s desk and slammed his palms down on the oak barrier in front of it, making everyone flinch. “This man is a distinguished guest of the United Soviet Socialist Republics, and I’ve been told you Americans want to harass him because of his Chinese heritage!”
“Sir, with all due respect—”
“He’s a fucking American!” Malik shouted.
“Sir! There are reports of the man running wild outdoors!”
“He’s an acrobat!” Malik was sweating fiercely. The adrenaline rush of intimidating a man must’ve been acute under stimulants. “I’ve taken care of the situation. It is done!” He lifted his hands. “Prokofiev! Go tell Denisov our guest has arrived and will be there shortly.”
The Russian bodyguard jogged dutifully down the corridor and took the stairs.
“Now wait a goddamnit minute,” said the American guard, “you can’t bum rush my station—”
“Check his ID, write down his name, do the minimum. We are expected.”
The guard was seething, but he seemed all too familiar with Malik. He snapped and motioned to the Zombie. “Your wallet.”
“Of course, sir,” The Zombie pulled it out of his pocket and tossed it underhanded without looking. His attention was on Malik, who was nearly apoplectic.
The diplomat mouthed through clenched teeth: You!
There was a thump from the direction of the desk. “Is this wet?” the guard asked with distaste.
“It fell into the river,” the Zombie replied without looking.
Malik glared like a man ready to commit murder.
Having made it clear that the man’s orders were suggestions at best, the Zombie finally looked at the desk as the guard gingerly opened the soggy fold of leather.
The printed cardstock for the driver’s license of the state of Massachusetts was tough, but two hours underwater had done its damage. He carefully peeled apart the contents, tugged out the half-torn license, and read the faded ink. “Mr. Yee, replace this card as soon as possible.” He opened a log book and wrote down the name and address. If they looked it up in a Boston directory, they’d find it was the location of a restaurant. The guard stuffed it in the wallet and tossed it back. “Go on then.” To Malik, “And expect a request for a security report from your office. I will not be stormed because Denisov wants to drink with circus folk.”
“Fine,” Malik said. He started off, and the Zombie fell in behind him with a large grin on his face. They came to an elevator by the stairwell, and Malik hammered the call button. “Can’t come fast enough,” he muttered. The door opened with a chime, and they huddled inside a truly modernized lift; no elevator cage was necessary.
Only after the door shut did Malik speak. “We’re heading to the third floor. There’ll be another station and another guard, and you’ll need documents or an escort to pass. It’ll be this at every entrance, at every major exchange, and then there’ll be my guards at the Soviet offices.”
The Zombie shrugged once and said nothing. Malik would show him everything. He had to. Trying to hide his defenses would only prove to the Zombie that the Bolsheviks had a weakness to hide. If it was truly impenetrable, he could make that judgement for himself. UN security was problematic, but it might be worth trying to trespass regardless. They’d get caught, of course, but once in custody, they could name drop Denisov. The Baron could come up with a story—he was an excellent liar—and then Denisov could be called down to explain.
That’s if they could call down Denisov.
On the third floor connector to the Secretariat tower, they stopped briefly at a checkpoint. The guard exchanged a brief radio note with the first floor library desk. He checked UN badges from Malik and the minder, then waved them on ahead and went back to reading a comic book.
They took another elevator up to the twenty-sixth floor. “We’re entering a hallway full of ears. Don’t say a word, or Langley will hear you.”
This floor must’ve contained most of the offices of the Warsaw Pact nations. It was amazingly quiet, and the ornamentation was rich, inviting, like a palatial hall in the dead of night. Crimson wallpaper coated the walls. Soft polished wood spread over the floors. Billowing couches, thick leather chairs, and ashtray stands spread along the hall, offering creature comforts. Nevertheless, nobody came out of their rooms to enjoy a smoke with their peers.
Malik led them in silence to the end of the hall and knocked twice at a door. A Russian man opened for him, and they crowded into another, smaller hallway with simpler decorations. “We can talk here,” Malik said. “Zombie, would you come with me? I want to show you something.” He curled a finger, and the Zombie followed dutifully.
He cracked open an office door. Inside, in the dark, was a half dozen cots with young men sleeping on them. Buzz cut hair and thick arms told much of the story. Malik told the rest: “Spetsnaz, GRU, and Bolshevik to the man. Armed, both mundane and occult.” He closed the door and went to the next room. He cracked it open. Another half dozen were sleeping.
The Zombie grinned broadly. This was likely the full extent of the military forces Malik was able to sneak into the Secretariat. It was also a probable supermajority of all inducted Spetsnaz members in general, collected here to guard Denisov.
Malik was shaking while he shut the door. “We’ve got ten rooms full of soldiers,” he said. “More forces than you can fend off. The Baron couldn’t come through this place alive.”
The Zombie folded his hands at his waist. “Would you kill him to prevent the Cat from reaching Denisov? Really? Knowing what you know?”
“I would murder Denisov first,” Malik whispered, “and if the Baron didn’t give up the Cat, we’d take it off his body and throw you back in the river.”
“You won’t kill Denisov,” the Zombie whispered back. “You would’ve done it already if you could, but you can’t. Not unless you want Apples thrown in Moscow.”
Malik’s jaw clenched, and he squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them wide again. “Test me,” Malik whispered. “Take away my chance to live, and see if I care about the Pact.”
The minder was standing behind him. He barked something fierce in Russian.
“Threaten the Baron, and Stalin would order your death,” the Zombie said.
“Pfah! The government would fall anyways,” Malik pointed at the Zombie, “but your suffering would be centuries long. Don’t test me!” His hand shuddered, but the Zombie couldn’t read whether it was drugs, fear, or nervous anger. Malik closed his eyes again and swallowed loudly. “I wish I wasn’t so ill,” he rasped. Peace descended over his sweating brow. When he opened them, some of the redness was gone. “Come with me, both of you. Come. I’ll show you to Denisov, you godless dog. See if you think you can win, after you see his cage.”
Author’s Note:
Nothing can contain the Zombie forever.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other readers!
Join the Patreon to support the story and access 4 weeks of early chapters!
