The Zombie’s vengeance couldn’t be satisfied with a few broken bones or a handful of someone’s innards pulled from their living abdomen. The direct perpetrators would know his wrath, and the rest of the National Guard would see their weapons turned against them.
All of that began with skipping the empty air between this bloodstained soil and that shattered window. The ballistic magic that had recently prevented General Osman’s demise could now enable a series of murders. With Schuler’s help, the Zombie could become an intelligent missile, and he could bring back a secular weapon so powerful that it nearly required his invincible hands. All of it could happen now, not minutes later.
Now, while anger burned.
The Baron stared up at him, sorrowful but understanding. d’Holbach’s blood soaked the collar of his white t-shirt, literally bled through the cotton. That injury would be answered.
Meister Schuler shook the Baron’s shoulder from behind. “We have to go!”
The philosopher’s head snapped to face that touch, stretching the open wound along his neck. Strings of torn tissue and ropy arteries strained along invisible lines, and fresh blood surged through the clotted flesh and along the wound surface before flowing up into his brain. “Okay. Yes. I’ll go,” he said, alive despite the missing chunk. He cast one last look at the Zombie, nodded his tentative approval, then turned and ran for the cover of the nearest tree.
Schuler stepped towards the Zombie, meeting his gaze with lustrous copper frames. Eyes communicated a silent understanding. They’d both turned enough living men into corpses to share a common value system. While the Baron hesitated, Schuler saw wisdom.
“Turn and face the building,” the Diviner said.
The Zombie pivoted, pointing a bloody hand towards the fifth-story window, some twenty yards away and up. “There.”
In the window, a guardsman struggled beside the machine gun, tugging on its bolt. In a moment, if secular efforts failed, magic might solve its broken mechanisms.
Meister Schuler put his hand on the Zombie’s back, bent as if he was about to throw him forwards, and wished, “Launch.” Then Schuler expressed the strength of titans, or maybe the gods threw the Zombie and Schuler merely mimicked it at a discount. Either way, the only comparable acceleration in the Zombie’s memory was from 1943, when he crashed a jeep into a concrete barrier and launched himself over the hood at about sixty miles per hour.
The world blurred; wind roared. The Zombie tumbled over exactly once, seeing the trees spin around him and then retreat away with the rest of the park before the building rolled into view, offering an open window to catch him. Gravity slowed him to the peak of an arc, but air resistance hadn’t stripped more than half his horizontal velocity.
The guardsman working the Browning’s bolt was staring at the mechanism. He looked to someone behind the weapon, who simultaneously spotted the Zombie and pointed in dumb shock. Thus, the man at the bolt glanced back just in time to witness the invincible man’s ballistic body, crashing into him.
It was like a collision in a Newton’s cradle, miraculously inelastic. The Zombie struck the guardsman, his invincible body stopped, and his victim absorbed all the momentum, flying across the room. The Zombie landed heavily on his chest and belly. The guardsman tumbled like he’d fallen from a passing truck and crashed into the back wall, breaking several bones. The impact sounded like a bundle of spring branches cracking over a knee.
One guardsman, still pointing at the Zombie, shouted at the absurd mechanics, at the collapsed Zombie, and at the crumpled and dying man beside him. “The fuck just happened?”
“He fuckin’ flew!” yelled another, as if that explained anything.
Then all the other voices joined in, overlapping: “Is there a fuckin’ catapult?”
“That’s impossible.”
“I don’t fucking know!”
“Maybe it was a trick of the light?”
“What fuckin’ light are you looking at?
Someone roared at the top of his lungs. “Shut up! All of you, shut up!”
Voices died away, and for two heartbeats, everyone was silent. There were five healthy guards in the room, staring at each other. A wet wheeze escaped the sixth, crumpled man, and he shuddered one last time, falling still. He wasn’t long for the world.
The Zombie waited with one cheek to the floor, eyes open and unblinking. He’d let them marinate for at least a few more seconds, and when he rose, their fear would be exquisite.
The man who’d demanded order spoke with the iron-certainty that he understood the world. “There has to be some sort of rational explanation.”
Then the guy at the back gestured at the crumpled man. “What about what Bobby said?”
A very reasonable sigh of frustration. “What about it?”
“He said those rainbows were magic. What if this was too?”
So the Zombie had already killed the occult member of the squad. Perfect.
The very reasonable man replied, “Magic isn’t real, private.”
And the Zombie couldn’t help himself. “Oh, it’s real, and you’re all dead,” he said, putting his arms beneath himself and pushing up to his feet.
“Oh, shit!” the reasonable man sputtered. He pulled a 1911 from a belt holster and jerked the slide in a clumsy panic. “Shoot him! Shoot the fucker!”
The Zombie stretched as men shouted, lifting personal weapons and toggling safeties. Then he ambled cheerily around the Browning’s temporary emplacement—a tripod mount, mounted with sandbags onto a factory-floor push.
The man with the pistol finally racked his weapon, lifted it, and pulled the trigger. One terrified shot instantly became a fusillade, as two other guards opened fire at the same time. The Zombie walked into the storm, feeling the bullets skip off him, stop dead, or sail through unimpeded. The man with the pistol ran out of bullets first; the slide stayed back.
“Stop shooting!” someone roared. “Don’t hit the Sarge!”
Gunfire stopped, though there were panicked shouts. “Watch it! Watch it!”
“Are you the Sergeant?” the Zombie asked the reasonable man.
The Sergeant, pale-faced, answered by wordlessly trying to reload his 1911 before dropping the loose magazine onto the floor.
The Zombie darted forward, thrusting his fingers towards the Sergeant’s chest. Luck favored the attack; instead of stopping, his fingers sank through cloth and flesh with unnatural ease, and the Zombie instantly curled his fingers over, hooking all four of them over a man’s living rib.
The Sergeant threw himself backwards in animal panic, and that one wild motion broke the rib and set it floating, but there was too much flesh and muscle holding that anatomical handle in place. The Zombie turned and dragged the Sergeant off his feet, eliciting the primal scream of a murder victim. If the poet Dante had truly dreamed of Hell, this was the sound he’d heard echoing throughout the nine circles. This agony. This unreal terror.
Everyone watched, stunned, as the Zombie dragged the screaming, half-paralyzed man for five long seconds. He held the Sergeant as if he were a suitcase, hanging from that rib, arms dangling and feet dragging, and he took him all the way to the window, heaved with poor form, and received the gods assistance while launching the screaming Sergeant over the windowsill and out onto the street below. They heard him fall across all five stories, two seconds of vanishing terror, until he struck the ground with a wet thud.
Then the Zombie turned back to the stunned onlookers and said, “Four to go.”
The Baron stood with his back to an old tree, while Meister Schuler finished lifting hands off the freshly scarred skin of his neck. He hadn’t seen the man fall, but he knew those kinds of screams. They haunted his worst nightmares. “It’s like the Napoleonic wars,” he told Schuler.
“Or when people know they’re being crushed,” the Diviner offered.
“It’s awful,” the Baron replied.
Schuler patted the Baron on the shoulder. “The body makes it awful. Otherwise, we wouldn’t struggle to live.”
A second scream erupted from the distant window, and a few seconds later, they both heard another man fall to the ground and slap onto asphalt with a wet smack, barely distinguishable from the ongoing battle. The Baron had nothing to offer in defense of the Zombie’s defenestration or against Schuler’s cruel observation. Indeed, the world contained agonies, and his dearest friend sometimes inflicted them in his name. Worse, there would be no justice for that pain; or maybe this was justice in some narrower sense, a response to the lethal shot to his neck.
One could ache with moral righteousness all they wanted, but no amount of feeling could change suffering, and in the end, he needed the Zombie’s violence to protect him.
Schuler peered at him through lustrous copper frames. “Do you feel guilty?”
“Never enough to stop fighting,” the Baron answered honestly. “As long as I’m around, I know he kills fewer people. He hesitates because of me.”
“Then why are you upset now? This is no worse than Salem.”
Another long, falling shout ended on hard streets. The Baron flinched, then met Schuler’s eyes again. “I wanted to leave without this kind of fighting. Without cruelty.”
“To my mind, this is less cruel,” Schuler argued. “In a few minutes, he’ll be carrying the nicest weapon on the battlefield.”
“Nice?” the Baron asked. “The Browning?”
“In his hands, a machine gun’s bullets can kill quicker and more kindly than even Green Dragon Crescent Blade. Just ask him to be quick. Merciful.”
“I’ll ask, but he might refuse me. He doesn’t want mercy.” The Baron tapped the scar on his neck, covering the healed carotid. “He wants satisfaction.”
The Zombie had killed his second soldier by driving his head through the panels of the wooden door and yanking down on his arms until his throat caught on the splintered edges. That corpse had kept everyone else in the room long enough for multiple defenestrations.
Now, only one possible victim remained. The final soldier was a skinny figure, holding onto a fatal chest wound with both hands. In all the madness, a ricochet had bounced off the Zombie like light off a mirror, striking him with his own shot.
Unlike the others, he hadn’t screamed or shouted even once. He was just a private, but he had the steel of a killer. When the Zombie turned to him, the soldier asked calmly, “Do I have to go out the window?”
The Zombie laughed under his breath. “How would you like to die?”
“Old.”
“Not an option.”
The soldier coughed. “Quick then.”
The Zombie glanced around the bloodied and gunshot floor, finding the dropped 1911 and the fumbled magazine. He nudged the pistol with his bare toe. “This?” he asked.
“Better than dropping.”
“Brave man.” The Zombie scooped up the weapon, grabbed the ammo, and reloaded it expertly. “You’ve earned this. Close your eyes?” he asked, aiming.
The last soldier grunted, shutting his lids.
The Zombie waited to the count of four, utterly soundless and motionless as he readied the fatal shot. Between the eyes, angled down to strike the brainstem. Then he pulled the trigger, and his last victim left this world without the pain of anticipation or any perception of his death.
“Not a single scream,” the Zombie said, tossing the pistol aside. “If the gods save you, hear this. You would’ve been a legend in another century.”
He quickly checked over the mounted Browning. It had most of an attached ammo box left, more than enough to kill the rest of the National Guard checkpoint. He fussed around the head of the tripod, pulled the pintle latch out, and freed the weapon. At a glance, he couldn’t tell how it was broken, but it’d hardly matter. It’d probably break even worse in a second, and then Schuler would restore it for the final assault. Unlike most men, he wouldn’t have to fire it from a hip or underarm position and could aim it without risking a shoulder injury.
Holding the Browning by its carrying handle, he went to the broken window, put one foot onto the sill, and looked down at the three bodies that he’d dropped onto the pavement. Each was mangled by a ragdoll impact, surrounded by the slow seeping of blood through all the cracks. He peered further out, above all but the oldest trees in the park. The Baron and Schuler were recognizable, hiding behind the oldest tree.
The Baron waved, recognizing him.
He waved back, then casually jumped out of the window, twisting to put himself between the Browning and the Earth. In that two second plunge, as the building rushed up and away, he prayed for the gods to preserve the weapon against his invincibility. Then he struck the road, splashing pavement in a spray of dark gravel, and the machine gun’s handle snapped off in his hand with a bang, but the gun itself rested neatly against his chest, stopping entirely.
“Hahaha! Yes!” He scooped up the machine gun by the foregrip, rolled up onto his knees and onto his feet, and carrying the massive thing like it was a mere hunting rifle, he sprinted towards Meister Schuler and his oldest friend. His heart soared.
“This weapon!” he shouted, glad for the kindness of the gods. “This fucking weapon! This violence, this proof! They love me!”
“Who loves you?” the Baron called as the Zombie came into earshot.
“It’s the will of the gods!” Meister Schuler shouted, smiling gleefully along with the Zombie. “If gods make devils, then they must love their fell creations!”
The Zombie whooped and sprinted past them. “Fix the weapon!” he shouted. “I’m clearing the gods-damn checkpoint!”
“Already fixed, in blessed silence!” Schuler yelled at his back.
“Make it fast!” the Baron shouted, pleading. “Kill them quick!”
“I will!” the Zombie roared, pleased with the tacit approval of murder, handed over by the most moral man. The soil and grass vanished beneath his footfalls, kicking up into wild plumes. New York soldiers were crouched behind the trees, firing at sandbags over a no-man’s land littered with the bodies of CPUSA mercenaries.
“Go get ‘em!” one New York cultist yelled.
The Zombie whooped, shooting past the last New Yorker, and he leaped over the outer hedge onto the intersection of Union Square West and East 15th street. Four members of the National Guard remained, shooting blindly at the Zombie’s approaching figure. About five blocks away, another jeep was pulling onto the street, carrying a vehicle-mounted Browning and a back seat lugging three more soldiers. Reinforcements were rushing in.
The guardsmen at the sandbags concentrated fire, peppering him and the Browning, but it hardly mattered. If the gun didn’t fire when he pulled the trigger, Schuler would restore it again.
He closed the last of the distance at a full sprint, clutched the machine gun to his chest, and performed an Olympic quality long-jump, legs up and out, sailing right over the sandbags. When bare feet hit the asphalt on the other side, it crumbled beneath his landing, and the rest of the force bled away into invincible joints and limbs. Soldiers were shouting at him.
“Shoot him! Shoot him!”
“I am!”
“He’s bulletproof!”
The Zombie bounced up into a standing position, planted his right foot, and swiveled, lifting the machine gun into a shoulder-aimed position. He closed one eye and peered over the sights, looking at the four desperate, already dead men.
One of them said, “Broken.”
There was a loud click in some internal part. The Zombie pulled the trigger, and nothing happened.
That cultist shouted, “Run for it!”
The weapon unclicked. Schuler had sensed the wish, and he’d repaired the weapon. So the Zombie pulled the trigger again, and the gun jumped in his iron grip, barking with enough force to tickle his cheek and tousle his hair. The first bullet managed to turn the cultist’s face into a hole and his brain into an insensate splash across a sandbag barrier, and the second two just chunked off pieces of bone until the corpse barely had a head.
The Zombie didn’t let off the trigger. He swept the weapon over, blasting out parts of the street and spattering sand, until he wrestled the secular source of thunderous wrath to face the next soldier, taking off the top of his skull. The third soldier foolishly jumped up and tried to run, which meant he took three shots to the chest before falling backwards onto the pavement like dead weight.
The last member of the National Guard shouted, “Right pocket!” and vanished with a clap of thunder.
The Zombie let off the trigger, lowering the Browning’s massive barrel. “Huh,” he said. There’d been two embedded occultists. Langley hadn’t sent enough men to hold this position, which meant they’d either planned to rely entirely on reinforcements, or they’d planned to use cultists for intelligence gathering on New York’s current movements and little else.
The only major threat left was the enemy jeep. The Zombie swept around, aiming the weapon again, ready to kill as many civilians as necessary—and the radio roared into life on the back of the nearby truck. The voice was Robert Heckhaus, shouting: “All lower Manhattan units, belay your current orders! Do not approach Union Square! I repeat, do not approach Union Square! Until further notice, retreat to a minimum of four blocks distance to avoid enemy mortar fire! Your commanding officers will have new orders for you shortly! Over and out!”
The incoming National Guard jeep, three blocks away, suddenly cut right, tires screeching on the pavement, and shot around an intersection and out of view.
The Zombie laughed, tipping the Browning up and leaning it against his shoulder. “Good enough for me,” he said cheerily, glancing around at the corpses. “You lose, and I win.”
The Baron heard the thunderclap of a dodge and the final shots of the Browning machine gun. Then silence finally fell over Union Square Park, and it was the true end of this battle. Even if his shoulders remained clenched, even if his heart pulsed and prepared him for a resumption of death and destruction, he understood that the Zombie had finished the job.
Over the last few minutes, the remaining CPUSA forces in the park had been driven into a National Guard checkpoint, and now the Guard itself had been eliminated. By now, the New York enforcers—those men with skills like Enzu, Mr. Roach, or Lt. Sadgrove—should’ve cleared Tammany Hall. All that remained was to walk to the intersection, to finish this task.
Meister Schuler was standing one step back and to the left of this old tree, smiling placidly while peering through his bifocals at something in the distance. He tipped his head slowly towards the Baron, raising a hand like a gentleman asking someone to a dance. “Follow me, Baron. It’s over. Together, I will win my prestige, and you will win your final chance for the world.”
Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach accepted that old, calloused hand and left the comfort of cover, of strong wood and bark against his back. There was no reason to hide now. All nearby enemies were dead, and if they somehow weren’t, the Cat could save him again.
As they walked through the grass, he said to Meister Schuler, “I can’t kill like you can.”
The Diviner shook his head like he’d heard a child complaining about the bitter flavor of nutritious vegetables. “Mm. You can kill. You have killed. I know this.”
They reached the hedge, and the Baron finished formulating his response. “I’m saying, I’m not a wizard, and you have oceans of prestige at your back. Is there anything I can say to get you to help me? To fight for the world you live in?”
Meister Schuler giggled. “You often speak of loyalty, devil. You shouted it at my keepers this morning. Was that a lie?”
“No, it wasn’t.”
Schuler looked back, catching the light in his bifocals, turning them briefly blank with reflections of the sun. “You haven’t given me a century of creature comforts despite my madness, Baron. They have.” He led the Baron towards the final gap in the sandbags, where the Zombie stood waiting. “I am as loyal as you. Respect that.”
“But it’s the world,” the Baron said. “For them, be loyal and save it.”
“No,” Schuler murmured. “Tweed is waiting for the world to die, so he can die with it. Find your own heroes. I’ll stay here to defend my cult against an army, and if you need prestige?” He briefly turned his head towards the Baron. “Buy it, or earn it.”
“You really don’t care,” the Baron said.
“I really don’t.” Schuler stepped between the sandbags, and the Baron crossed the final line with him. Then Schuler released his hand, and the Baron was in the checkpoint, surrounded by three corpses, three abandoned jeeps, and a flatbed truck with a radio set in the back.
Schuler spread his arms, fell to his knees on the pavement, and beamed at the open spring sky. “Ahhh!” he said, letting out a deep breath. “Beautiful day! That is a reward!”
“Friend,” the Zombie said, waving him closer. “Aren’t you glad you swallowed the Cat?”
“I am,” the Baron agreed, putting a hand on that neck scar. “I’m still here.”
The Zombie reached out very, very carefully, put a pair of fingers gingerly on the Baron’s scar, and grinned as if that wound, and that survival, were his in effigy. “You are here, and I won’t let you leave this world before your time, you old bastard.” Then he removed his hand and laughed, and the Baron couldn’t help but smile with him, even in this grim hour.
They had in fact escaped Tammany Hall.
The radio in the flatbed truck crackled to life. “Baron? Baron d’Holbach? If you’re still at the intersection, please respond, over.”
The Baron recognized the voice with a twinge of paranoia. “Is that Heckhaus?” He glanced around. “Does he have a spotter on us?”
“No!” Meister Schuler said, jumping to his feet and bouncing on his heels. “No, that was the end of the task! His Oracles say you are here, because the reward was paid!” The Diviner darted past the Baron and Zombie, rushing over to snatch up the handset. He depressed the call button, shouting gleefully, “Special Operations Group, Robert Heckhaus! The Baron will not be answering this call, for this is not his place. It is mine! Over!”
He released it and hummed, waiting for a response.
Heckhaus came on the radio. “Then pass along this message to him. Since the Baron must be alive, tell him that he’s failed. The National Guard is taking over Manhattan, and we’re encircling Tammany entirely. At this point, I suggest he surrenders to me immediately. If he does, my hospitality will be generous, and his patriotism will be rewarded. Over.”
Schuler pressed the call button and laughed like he’d heard a bad joke over a beer. “One moment. I’ll tell the Baron what he needs to hear, and then I’ll tell you what you need to hear.” He lifted his hand away briefly. “Baron, if you please?” He pointed past the truck, towards a distant building. “There’s a woman two blocks away, waving at you.”
The Baron took two steps left, looking down the empty roads, evacuated ever since the fighting began. There was a woman leaning out of a storefront—not Phyllis, but a lady of similar stock, wearing pants and work clothes. She waved eagerly, as if summoning him over.
“An Artemisian,” the Zombie said behind the Baron.
“Absolutely,” Schuler said. “I sense her prestige. Now, if you devils will go and participate in your apostasy, I would appreciate being rid of you. Hmm?”
The Baron took a deep breath and sighed. For him, the day wasn’t even close to over. “Let’s go,” he said to the Zombie. “Maybe she knows where we can find Phyllis.”
“I hope she knows how to get out of Manhattan,” the Zombie said. “You heard Heckhaus.”
As the Baron started off along the sidewalk, he heard Meister Schuler back at the truck again. “Agent Heckhaus, thank you for waiting! The Baron ran off with his soulless monster, gods know where they’ve gone, but here’s some important news. I, Meister Schuler, will remain here, defending Tammany. So go to your secular contacts and tell them to fuck off entirely. They’ll have to give up on the Hall unless they want to keep losing men to ancient weapons and powerful wizards…”
They left earshot before Schuler finished, and if Heckhaus replied, they never heard it. They didn’t have to. They’d escaped, and by hook or by crook, their next step was to reach Denisov and deliver the Cat out of the Baron’s belly and into the diplomat’s bloody hands.
Author’s Note:
That ends one of the really heavily rewritten arcs in my book! I hope you enjoyed it. <3
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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The Baron knelt by the window, jerking a thumb out over the edge. “Let’s talk about strategy. CPUSA is still in the building, but the enforcers are clearing them out, right?”
“That’s right,” Schuler agreed.
“And there’s New York men outside. Lieutenant Decoin, correct?”
“Yes, but he’s with most of his forces, moving along 17th street. They’re aiming to retake the north entrance. What you’re hearing to the southwest are a few squads trying to secure the park before the National Guard moves in. CPUSA is facing a pincer.”
“You know all that?” the Baron asked.
“As much as anyone can. While I was fighting the Zombie, General Osman wished to make a phone call on a dead handset. Boss Tweed dispatched scouts after he dodged, and they reported in by radio. Our eyes are opening to the world around us.”
“So how many people will we have to carry us across the park?”
“Guaranteed? Only myself and your Zombie.” Schuler looked up at the ceiling. “The General will help after I report in though. The terms of the task will convince him, and once the soldiers see his support, they’ll follow my orders.”
The Baron didn’t share Schuler’s confidence, but he didn’t want to argue with their temporary, task-driven ally. “Will you do the talking?”
“Yes, but Baron, be at ease. I’m the Wizard of the East. Osman won’t deny me.” Schuler stood beside the Baron, back pressed to the bookcase. His glasses caught the light as he scanned the dark green hedgerows and spring green trees, gently shuffling in a cool breeze. “We’ll clear the path, cutting across the greens towards the Flagstaff.” He gestured to the copper-clad pole, holding a flaccid sheet of stars and stripes far above the surrounding park. “Focus on survival. Spare the lives of the Cat, for whatever purposes the gods desire.”
The Baron squinted up at the Diviner. “If the gods want to help me save the world, then why stop after crossing the park? Why not assign the task to give the Cat back to Denisov, if that’s the point of their intervention?”
“Excellent question,” the Zombie added.
Schuler looked down at the Baron, peering with a slightly slack expression—not for a lack of focus, but to let his thoughts flow freely. “Have you ever known the gods to tell a human-ready narrative? No?”
“No.”
“Yet you do know the gods intervene to punish temple-breakers, to bring justice to Falls, and so on.”
“Yes. They targeted me in Europe.”
“So consider that you are now, however briefly, a means to an end in a much grander scheme, but you’re not the point. Nothing you desire is the point. Not a single damn thing in this world is the entire point of their actions. Otherwise, we’d have figured it out by now.”
“That’s a disappointing answer,” the Baron said. “It’s accepting ignorance.”
“It is.” Schuler looked back out at the world, at the robin’s egg sky, at the dead men scattered along the paved footpaths, separating the green groves. “Only the Apostate knows, Baron. What matters today is that I’ll finish the gods’ task, and I’ll earn prestige in their eyes. What happens to the world is not my concern, nor that of the gods. If you desperately need an answer, I’d guess that you’re meant to die somewhere else, not in New York’s hands. I still think these are the last days of the Earth.”
“They better not be,” the Zombie said gravely. “The Pact is as serious as any atomic bomb, and I’d like to read more books.”
“Fair enough.” Schuler scanned the length of the ruined sedan outside the window. “Let’s get in cover behind the car. I’ll jump first. Zombie, second. Baron, third. Go quickly, and it’s unlikely they’ll shoot our mortal man. Ready?”
d’Holbach glanced at the CPUSA corpses around the door to the office, covered in bricks and red dust. “Do we want to dig up any of their guns?”
“I’ll grab something outside,” Schuler answered. “The Zombie has his fists.”
“He can throw me again,” the Zombie suggested.
“That I will.”
The Baron took a deep breath. If they were satisfied with their capacity for violence, then there truly was only one way forward. “I’m ready. On go?”
Schuler grunted.
The Zombie stepped up behind the Diviner. “Three, two, one, go!”
Schuler grabbed the windowsill and vaulted, throwing his feet over and out. The bottom story was on ground level, but the window was deep, as long as a brick and a limestone slab stacked together. Four shots rang out; two struck Schuler in motion, throwing splashes of blood across the limestone cladding of Tammany Hall. The Diviner landed on the glass shards with a crunch, then ducked down behind the car. Both wounds were already restored.
The Zombie vaulted next; another two shots rang out.
The Baron went right on his invincible heels, vaulting last. A final shot rang out, but scattered off the Zombie just in front of him, sending fragments of bullets into the stretch of sidewalk beside the car. The vehicle was parked facing the wrong direction for this side of the street, but that was to their benefit. The Baron landed, crunching glass, then jumped over the dead man in a suit, angling for the spot where the open driver’s side door would protect his body on the left. The Zombie slammed into the exterior on the right, placing himself between d’Holbach and Schuler.
At a glance, the sidewalk facing the park was empty but for a few more corpses. That made sense. Anyone posted up against the building was an easy target from shooters on all sides of the conflict. “What’s next?” the Baron hissed.
Schuler cleared his throat. “I wish to be heard by General Osman. General, please come to the west wall, right beneath the pediment. Cut a hole with the blade, but stay out of view, and ask Mr. Roach to be your spotter. We’ll talk once the wall is open.”
“You’re asking him to damage the Hall with a magic weapon?” The Baron tried to keep the astonishment out of his voice, but this moment was continuing to change faster than his expectations could keep up.
“I’m not asking the General,” Schuler answered. “I’m telling him what to do.”
In the back of his mind, the Baron had already known the masquerade was damaged. The occult was spilling over into the secular in ways that’d be remembered for decades. Hundreds of men would perish. Property damage would take months or even years to resolve. The police were already dismissed from New York’s streets, replaced by the National Guard.
In some sense, these were the first days of what might be a final battle, ending in nuclear warfare. Yet he anticipated the next few minutes with an itch of frustration.
The Green Dragon Crescent Blade was about to be fired out in the open. Anyone staring out of some window at the madness would soon see rainbows slashing the clear spring air. Fragments of jade would be found mixed with the park soil. Explaining any of this would be challenging. Conspiracies would form around the occult evidence, and secular history would be full of cracks. Like scar tissue, urban legends would eventually subsume the unreal elements, healing over the breaks, but until then, people would whisper stories about a strange, bloody day in the spring of 52.
The Zombie was laughing at his own thoughts, low and pleased. He glanced over at the Baron. “We’ll deliver you. Trust me.”
The Baron licked his lips. “Yes—”
A curved arc of violet light cut out of the second story beneath the pediment of Tammany Hall, the intent of a tremendous sculptor to chisel out a new hole. Then the spring air exploded green, as loud as artillery in the hills, and a few yards south, powder and limestone sand rained down onto the sidewalk, mixing with stone confetti of sparkling jade. Red light glowed briefly over the street, muted by the white sunshine.
The Baron whistled. “I wonder what the National Guard will say.”
The Zombie answered in a whiny, mocking tone: “I’m an American soldier, but I just shit my pants because a rainbow exploded in the sky.”
Schuler laughed. The Baron managed to control himself and only smiled.
A second arc of rainbow light, shaped like the letter V, soared towards the treetops in the park, followed by another green explosion, cutting loose all the brickwork and limestone of that second story wall. An angled segment tumbled outward, crashing down to the sidewalk and shattering. Dust briefly poured out of the hole in the face of the Hall, and in the park, all gunfire fell silent. Two artillery blasts had forced a momentary pause in their battle.
“Schuler!” called the voice of General Osman, reedy and distant over the breeze. “Are you out there? What madness have you asked me to do?”
“I am here!” Schuler yelled back. “With Baron and Zombie alike!”
“The Baron? Did you capture him?” Osman yelled.
“No, General! Do you have Mr. Roach spotting?”
“What do you mean, no?”
“Do you have Mr. Roach spotting?” Schuler repeated.
The tip of a Garand shoved out of the hole, waggling from side to side in an awkward wave. “I’m here!” Mr. Roach called. “The General is staying in cover!”
“Is there anything happening at Union Square West and East 15th?” Schuler yelled.
The Garand tip retreated a bit, turning forty-five degrees southwest, towards the same spot Schuler had pointed towards earlier. It was an intersection directly across the wooded body of the park, ending at a street about two-thirds of the length south from Tammany Hall. “The National Guard is setting up a checkpoint!” Mr. Roach answered.
“Then we have a new task from the gods!” Schuler yelled up to them. “Seven centuries of prestige for taking the Baron across Union Square Park to the National Guard checkpoint!”
“Dead or alive?” General Osman yelled.
“Alive! But I will kill all else, General, including the soldiers at that damned checkpoint! If the gods demand that we let the Baron go, then we will use the Zombie, we will collect our prize, and we will beat back the Guard! Would you assist us with artillery?”
There was a long pause. The Garand retreated briefly.
“Will he help?” the Baron asked.
The Zombie answered before Schuler could. “He will. More than he wants the Cat, he’d love to conquer and keep this territory out of Langley’s hands.”
Schuler gave a thumbs up. “Exactly, devils. Trust in his love for war.”
“We will cut them all down!” General Osman shouted. “Mr. Roach, call the angles! Schuler, take command, highlight muzzle fire, and make sure we receive that prestige! If the Boss complains, we’ll offer him the Hall itself as our prize! Now, boys, to war!”
“To war!” Schuler yelled.
“To war!” the Zombie shouted.
“To war,” the Baron muttered, peeking carefully through the car windows at the park, heading towards the Independence Flagstaff. There was a lot of open ground from the north end of the plaza to the outer stone wall and its stout hedge. Running across it would expose him to nearly twenty seconds of open gunfire.
It’d be better if they could move the car for cover, but the front wheels were missing.
But how were the rear wheels? He knelt, glancing past the curb and beneath the car. Both rear tires were inflated. No obvious damage. This was a 2-door sedan, seashell green. It might do the trick. “Zombie, do you recognize this vehicle?”
“This?” the Zombie asked, still crouching beside the Baron. “Chevy Deluxe Sedan, last year’s model. 2-speed automatic transmission. Yeah, I recognize it.”
“What’s the drive train? Front or rear?”
The Zombie paused for a moment. Then a huge grin broke out onto his face. “Rear wheel drive!”
“Lucky then. We can use it for moving cover.” In this condition, the car was difficult to drive forwards, but trivial to run backwards. With the engine gunned, they could drag the front bumper until the entire thing broke down. It’d protect them all the way across the barren north plaza until they could ram it into the stone barrier beneath the first line of hedges.
“An excellent idea,” Schuler judged. “Get in, devil. I’ll start the engine. Baron, we’ll run close behind and drive straight towards the Flagstaff.”
“Let’s do it,” the Baron agreed.
The Zombie skirted around his back, then hopped up into the driver’s seat. “Light it,” he called, quickly shutting the driver’s side door. “No windshield. If you have orders, shout ‘em.”
“Start,” Schuler commanded.
The car’s engine turned over and rumbled into life.
The Zombie laughed, tapping the accelerator while the car was in park. Twice, the engine roared. Then he depressed the brake, switched the automatic transmission into reverse, and grabbed the steering wheel with one hand. Someone shot a rifle through the back windshield, striking the Zombie in the shoulder. “Let’s roll!” he roared.
Then he yanked the wheel, tapped the gas, and backed away from the sidewalk in a sharp arc. Instantly, the bumper caught on the curb and snapped off with a bang of failing steel bolts, followed by the front end of the chassis scraping over asphalt with a blend of heavy rattles and metallic screeches, shearing off two showers of white-hot sparks from the friction. With a couple of quick yanks, he angled the rear to the southwest, facing directly towards the Flagstaff at the center of the park and East 15th street on the other side.
The car wouldn’t last long in this configuration, but with luck, they could reach the hedge before the engine compartment failed or the drive train broke.
The Baron and Schuler skittered around the vehicle, putting it between them and most possible enemy positions. The Diviner planted his hands on the hood; the Baron mimicked him, keeping low. Then Schuler yelled, “Go! I’ll limit your speed!”
The Zombie didn’t hammer the accelerator, but he gave it a generous press, and the car lurched into another metallic wail, immediately yanking it out of their hands.
“Ten!” Schuler wished, bursting up into a sprint, and the Baron joined him at a break neck run. That was ten miles per hour, pathetic for a car, but only slightly slower than a strong human sprint.
The Zombie jumped the far curb up onto the plaza, making a loud bang as the front hood slammed into the concrete lip. The Baron caught up to him on the flagstones, sprinting into the backspray of steel sparks until he could plant his hands on the rumbling vehicle and keep them there, lowering his head to stay in cover.
Schuler stayed back a few feet to spot targets in the middle of his own run. A rifle shot passed through him, striking Tammany Hall far behind him and knocking out a window. More bullets burst through the car, striking the steel and the Zombie himself. The Baron flinched, but there was nothing to do but keep running. Twenty feet out from the wall. Ten feet out.
“Release!” Schuler wished.
The limits on the sedan vanished, and the Zombie whooped as the engine lurched out of the Baron’s grasp, accelerating. A single heartbeat passed, and the Baron redoubled his efforts to keep up, knowing how this would end.
The sedan struck the outer wall and the hedge with a crash of stone, brush, and steel, like someone dropping the entire percussion section off a catwalk into an orchestra pit. The vehicle stopped dead, but the engine sputtered through three smokey coughs before releasing its pistons with a loud ping, like a hammer striking an anvil. The hood itself rattled over jumping engine parts, then fell silent. With a joyous cackle, the Zombie crawled up and over the dashboard, through the missing windshield, and onto the hood.
Schuler caught up, slamming his hands onto the car. “Ready, Zombie?”
“Do it!” the Zombie yelled, standing tall.
“Launch!” Schuler wished, and the same forces that’d once thrown the Zombie through a wall now catapulted him up into the air, ballistically flying along a shallow arc through the trees beyond the hedgewall. The invincible man tumbled over, peaked before two elms, and crashed through a bundle of tree boughs, scrabbling at the branches with his arms to right his body as he fell down to the shaded soil and landed awkwardly near the center of the grove. Boughs and leaves rained down around him, torn off the trees by his cannonball entrance.
Total distance, maybe twenty yards, a quarter of the distance to their destination, and more than enough to place him between multiple enemy positions. The Zombie stood, kicking off his other ruined shoe, and the first shots began to issue from around trunks, from the other hedgewall at the far end of the grove, and from beneath park benches. Disturbed leaves, fresh holes in his clothes, and puffs of blasted soil indicated a surprising volume of ricocheting bullets.
“Four seconds, CPUSA has bright muzzles,” Schuler wished, squatting beside the Baron. d’Holbach was breathing heavily, trying to recover after a sprint, so he couldn’t find the breath to voice the absurdity of that wish. It gave knowledge indirectly by changing an unknown number of bullets at multiple unknown locations for a significant period of time. The price should’ve been obscene, but maybe Schuler already knew where the enemy was. He could sense the world as the gods sensed it. Maybe this was cheap enough for a Diviner like him.
The next enemy shots taken in Union Square Park flashed like camera bulbs, unmistakably bright even against the noonday sun. Half-hearted shots at the Zombie were now fatal mistakes. Most gunfire stopped immediately, but it was too late.
The eagle-eyed Mr. Roach watched from afar.
“Loud,” Schuler wished. Immediately, his voice echoed like a bullhorn across the parkland: “New York soldiers! Shoot anyone who runs from those positions!”
The Baron glanced back at Tammany Hall, and he saw the first violet slice pass through the bricks and arc through open air like an arrow, brightening towards glorious cyan hues. He covered his ears; the end of the slash touched one of the CPUSA positions, huddled down on the other side of the grove behind a second hedgewall.
That one slash nearly reached the center of the park.
The enemy soldiers had seen what the Green Dragon Crescent Blade could do to the Hall, but Schuler’s orders had coerced them to stay in cover. Three men were crouched behind those bushes—the Baron could make them out, struggling to rise through the violet arc.
The slash exploded into green, annihilating the hedge, destroying half a foot of rock wall, and leaving three sets of human legs tumbling to the ground, while three dismembered torsos rolled backwards through an orange and red haze onto the pavement around the Flagstaff. A rain of jade scales signed their thunderous deaths.
Before anyone could process what had happened, General Osman had already thrown out another two violet slashes, sweeping out two more locations along the far hedge.
“Baron!” Schuler yelled, trying to be heard as further explosions of green decimated enemy positions. He pointed past the wrecked car, to the fresh cuts in the far hedgewall. “Do you see the Flagstaff base?”
It was impossible to miss the truck-sized granite pedestal, but in such chaos, Schuler was only being thorough. “I see it,” the Baron replied.
A momentary peace followed the last two artillery strikes. “We’ll run through the grove. I’ll lead the charge. New York’s men will rush the enemy positions. You’ll count to five, then follow, using the tree trunks as cover. Understand?”
The Baron absolutely understood what this meant. New York soldiers were about to charge, and though it’d win them a forward position and possibly the entire conflict, it’d cost lives. He was experienced enough at strategy to recognize this, and intelligent enough to know that he could no longer refuse the inevitable casualties.
He’d risked his own life many, many times over the last few days, pushing the boundaries beyond the point of foolishness. His principles had worked—barely—in an environment where words still shared space with bullets, but negotiations no longer had a role on this battlefield.
The Baron had to accept that men would die, and he’d have to kill some himself and accept the sacrifice of others. This was a microcosm of the war he’d hoped to prevent, but if he delivered the Cat to Denisov, it might end today, instead of spreading like a wildfire.
So d’Holbach girded himself, ignored the guilt, and agreed with what Schuler intended and what the Zombie surely wanted. “Start the charge. Five seconds, and I’ll run.”
The Diviner nodded. “Loud,” he wished. Then like a bullhorn, his voice echoed, signalling to both soldiers and enemies that the hour of battle was a hand: “New York! Center park, advance!” Then he stood, wishing again, “Flashes,” and he ran up onto the hood of the ruined car, strode across the roof, and jumped down to the soil of the grove.
Five seconds, starting now.
New York soldiers deployed on Schuler’s orders. Maybe they were simply that loyal, or maybe they feared the Diviner’s unnatural awareness. Maybe it was both. Squads of armed men materialized out of the shaded landscape, wriggling through hedges, leaping up from low spots in the grove’s topography, and unfolding from behind tree trunks into a broad, armed advance. All of them started shooting, suppressing enemy positions as they moved.
Three seconds.
Two bundles of CPUSA mercs were trapped in the middle of the trees, somewhere close to the Zombie. Both groups decided to shoot back at the New York advance. Their muzzle flashes were again brighter than the surrounding sunshine, alerting Mr. Roach.
New York reacted immediately. Most soldiers rushed to the temporary cover of tree trunks, pouring fire towards those concentrations of enemy forces. Four friendlies fell to their knees, grappling at fatal entry wounds. Two collapsed, instantly dead.
Time was up.
More slices of rainbow arced down through the groves themselves, and those CPUSA mercenaries scattered, screaming as green light cut down thirty years of tree growth and about half of their number in thunder-loud blasts of rainbow light. Then every other member of CPUSA jumped up and either fought earnestly or ran like hell, and there was no sense of order anymore.
The Baron followed directions, jumped up onto the car hood, and leapt over the ruined hedge onto the grove lawn, immediately sprinting towards the nearest unoccupied tree for cover.
Twenty yards out, the Zombie was running down a screaming man in a WW2 uniform, beating at his back with invincible fists. The third strike visibly crumpled the victim’s spine, and the Zombie tumbled over the fresh corpse before quickly scrambling to his feet.
The Baron sprinted for the next tree, head on a swivel. More camera flash shots. CPUSA no longer cared about positional advantage. They shot because the enemy was closing in, flanking them, gunning them down. It was a rout, a slaughter. Screaming men fell over, peppered with bullets until something vital was struck, silencing them.
Meister Schuler sprinted through the trunks at an impossible speed, wish-augmented. He pointed at one CPUSA man running for the back hedge with a Springfield M1903, and he shouted, “Here!” The bolt-action jumped back towards Schuler, breaking the merc’s wrist, and the Diviner caught up to the arc of the weapon, catching it cleanly by the stock while sliding to a stop in black boots, casting a plume of leaves and soil ahead of him.
He raised the rifle with one hand, operated the bolt with the other, and snapped it up to aim. No wishes were needed, not with his unreal awareness. He shot the gun’s owner in the back, operated the bolt, and snapped to the next target. Noting his stopped position, a merc unleashed a burst with an SMG, hitting him in the chest and neck, but the wounds closed while Schuler sniped his second target in the head. Another round blasted through the Diviner’s cheek, surely striking his brain while knocking his glasses askew. Nevertheless, Schuler only shuddered once, righted his glasses while operating the bolt a third time, and cleanly shot a man running past the base of the Flagstaff. The assailant with the SMG saw this and ran.
“Fuck!” the Baron cursed, awed at the unfair power of the Diviner.
“Baron!” Schuler yelled without looking back. “Advance!”
d’Holbach sprinted forward again, darting from trunk to trunk while Schuler killed two more men with the last two loaded rounds. The Springfield was empty.
Schuler roared, “Javelin!” With perfect form, he launched the rifle skyward, and with an absurd grace, it arced over and down, hitting a different CPUSA merc right at the edge of the grove and stabbing four inches of barrel into his lower back, knocking him clean over.
The Zombie was running for the same target. When he saw the merc fall, he jumped up and came down with both invincible feet onto the back of the fallen man’s neck. The miraculous result was a wet crush of obliterated meat and bone. The head rolled several feet, and the Zombie slipped in gore, laughing wildly, but he didn’t fall. He found the next target and sprinted after them, two bloodied hands extended to snuff another life with gruesome grappling.
The New York advance swept up behind the Baron, firing at fleeing targets. More rainbows of the Green Dragon Crescent blade stabbed into the park, slashing through standing structures and any CPUSA mercenaries who’d dared to stop and fight. d’Holbach had only one line of trees left ahead of him; he bolted up to the last one, staring at the nearest hole in the next hedge. Beyond it, scattered human legs introduced pools of blood leading to dead torsos. That’d been the first artillery strike from General Osman. It was an awful road to salvation.
Schuler and the Zombie both converged on the Flagstaff pedestal, individually pushing over the hedge. The Diviner had a pistol, barking and biting with unreal precision. The invincible man drove enemies away with a reputation for sheer brutality. Behind them trailed a shadow of safety, composed entirely of surviving New York soldiers. Maybe a quarter of them had fallen in the charge, hurried to the afterlife in service of the world’s largest cult. The rest moved as if none had died.
“Over the next hedge!” Schuler yelled. “Push the advantage! Don’t let them regroup!”
The Zombie grabbed the lip of the Flagstaff pedestal and climbed up onto it. He planted bloody footprints on its granite surface and wrapped a bloodied hand on the copper cladding of the flagpole. Peered towards their destination, he shouted, “CPUSA is engaging the National Guard! I repeat, CPUSA is engaging with secular forces!”
The sounds of gunfire rapidly rose at their destination. Another long arc of rainbow shot over the park, coming down close to the far end of the second grove. A green explosion shook all the leaves and boughs, making soldiers flinch in their advance.
“New York, keep moving!” Schuler yelled, boosting his volume with prestige.
The Baron ran past the fallen bodies, right up to the pedestal’s east face. He pressed himself against a bronze bas-relief of a naked woman and called up to the Zombie, “I’m here!”
The invincible man appeared at the edge above him, looking down. “Injuries?”
“None,” the Baron said hurriedly. “Am I good to move?”
“Yeah, I’ll cover you. Let’s run!”
The Baron ducked around the north end of the pedestal. The Zombie jumped down just ahead of him, providing a mobile shield. All around, New York cultists were running to the hedgeline, clambering up, and pushing forward. The Baron ran amongst them, squeezing between two hedge bushes and into the shade of this final grove.
At the intersection beyond—at the destination for Schuler’s task—the Baron could make out the National Guard checkpoint. Three jeeps were parked next to a flatbed truck full of equipment, and in front of those vehicles, six American soldiers were crouched behind sandbags, exchanging fire with the advancing occult. One of them had binoculars and was pointing at the violence in the park. Another was crouched, yelling into a radio handset at the back of the parked truck. Their weapons often paused—CPUSA mercs or New York soldiers repeatedly wished to break the Guard’s guns—but one of those six must be a cultist. After a moment, each Guard rifle returned to action as if it’d never been broken.
In effect, Langley’s secular hand was enforcing order with lethal force. They were treating Lower Manhattan like a warzone. What was Heckhaus’s excuse? What story was the media told? Was this a Cold War incident? Or were they labor riots incited by socialist or anarchist parties? The secular outcome would find its context tomorrow. Given the current tensions, blame would probably land squarely on remnants of the CPUSA, crushing them to dust.
Still, those vehicles had delivered very few soldiers to the checkpoint. It’d be trivial to overrun their position with Meister Schuler and the Zombie. Langley would lose this location, even if they had enough secular firepower to conquer the rest of the borough.
With every known threat accounted for, the Baron’s brain could finally dismiss the concerns of immediate survival. Well-practiced, he repeated the exercise that’d saved his life in the subway, and as he moved in the Zombie’s shadow, he scanned the environment for unknown threats.
On the south side of the coming intersection, Amalgamated Bank owned a five-story box of a building, fully stripped of all the decorative cast iron that’d once made it the prize of the jewelers, Tiffany & Co. Its tiny, slit-like windows were well-shadowed from the bright sunshine, allowing the Baron to look inside, but they were largely empty. The Baron could make out only a handful of shadowed faces, likely employees, called in on a Monday despite the violence. Now, they were witnesses to a terrifying fraction of the occult world.
On the north side of the intersection, there was a twelve-story office building, a grid of brick and steel holding up dozens upon dozens of tiny windows. That density offered a number of possible positions for spotters and gunmen, but the angle of reflection was poor from the Baron’s position, and most of its windows showed only a reflection of the midday sky.
He shaded his face with his hand and peered at the building anyways, focusing on the floors closer to the ground, just above and below the Dubois Uniforms sign that faced the park.
Later, he’d conclude that his body language triggered a response. On the fifth floor, in the windows just above the painted sign, a figure moved, pushing a dark, mounted machine closer to the glass, and before the Baron could recognize the hostility in that act, they destroyed the windows by unleashing an unmistakable wrath upon Union Square Park.
The M2 Browning .50 caliber machine gun was the reaper’s typewriter, spelling out battlefield eulogies. Its .50 BMG cartridges were nearly as long as a dollar bill and produced five times the force of a Springfield .30-06 for a bullet five times as large. It boasted a rate of fire exceeding four hundred shots per minute and excellent accuracy up to a mile. To put it bluntly, the Browning was designed to shoot down airplanes, and it’d been repurposed for shredding enemy vehicles and mowing down combatants through dense cover.
When the Browning erupted, the Zombie was standing in the wrong place to properly shield the Baron. Its barrel swung down to fire through the trees. Branches blasted into pieces, deflecting rounds. Bullet impacts swept across the soil, traced over the Zombie, and reached the Baron before he finished reacting, long before the Zombie could help.
The Baron dove into his friend’s back while a round tore past his shoulder, just over the collarbone. The Zombie swept around in turn, protecting the shorter man with his body, arms spread wide and back hunched, but the gesture came too late. The Baron felt a twinge of nerves and slapped at the side of his neck, and he missed. The firing stopped.
“Broken!” Schuler yelled to the New Yorkers. “The gun is disabled! Get up! Move, now, now!”
The Zombie grabbed the Baron’s shoulders and held him at arm’s length, mouth open. Eyes like platters. He mouthed words, forgetting to breathe, then took in a sharp breath and asked, “Friend?” That one word was strained under the weight of mortal terror. For a man with an invincible body and no inner life, fear for another was nevertheless unbearable.
d’Holbach felt waves of pain rocketing up and down his neck. The right side of his face was paralyzed. He felt a jet of blood from his carotid artery; then another splashing his palm as he clamped down on the wound. Each pulse drained him, made him dizzy. His legs shook him, and his visual field shrank. How much blood had he lost before he even felt it?
“Paul-Henri!” the Zombie shouted. When d’Holbach fell to his knees, the invincible man gripped his hand to keep him up. “Can you move?”
“They winged me,” the Baron said, trying to crack a joke, to cover up for the cold horrible feeling that was cramping down through him. His left eye was half closed. Only the right side of his mouth forced a smile. The bullet had barely clipped him, but it’d torn straight through a muscle, severing nerves and an artery. He was still losing blood, but he couldn’t feel the Cat. Wasn’t this fatal? Wasn’t this the road to death? “Am I dying?” he asked.
“You’ll live!” the Zombie yelled, desperate for anything other than inaction. “So stop holding onto this life and move! Before they fix the weapon, hurry up and move!”
The Baron understood. He took his hand off the wound, felt one more pulse of spurting blood—and the Cat seared through him like the dawn over a dazzling ice sheet. Fire burned up from his heart and through the artery, sealing it shut. He felt lines of fire cut through the muscles on his face and through the severed muscle of his neck. Invisible cords of force tied him together, and he willed them to move. Fire pulled his muscles, tickled his nerves. Like the puppeteer, he hooked the strings and commanded their dance, and the reins were his again.
He grasped the Zombie’s invincible hand with his own bloody fingers and felt himself lifted effortlessly off the ground and thrown forward. He stumbled deeper into the grove, seeing New York soldiers rushing alongside him while Schuler ran back towards him.
In the sky above, a rainbow arced out of Tammany Hall and swept across the park diagonally towards Dubois Uniforms, but it stopped short of the office building and exploded in thin air. Thunder echoed across the buildings without destruction.
“Did they miss?” the Baron asked Schuler.
“The General is out of range!” Schuler yelled, running over to meet them. “I’ll escort you! Heal you! Just keep moving!” He waved the Baron forwards, towards the checkpoint.
“Wait, wizard!” the Zombie barked, staring up at the Browning, poking its black barrel through the shattered window. “Launch me up there first! I want that damn gun!”
Author’s Note:
We’re closing in on the finale of this arc!
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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The Baron had shouted his throat raw. Enzu had magically jammed an SMG. The wish that sustained the Baron was almost certainly resolving minor issues in his ankles and knees, dismissing gradual inflammation after dropping a whole story onto thin carpeting.
These were signals, mundane and occult, and Meister Schuler was the most sensitive radio on the planet. There was no doubt that the Diviner would catch up to the Baron, probably before he could leave the building. So while d’Holbach sprinted west along a narrow hall, he made a strategic decision, which he hoped would save him from rapid recapture.
“Zombie!” he roared at the top of his lungs. “I need help!”
In response, somewhere behind him in the east, his own voice rang out in desperation, “Zombie! I think Schuler is copying my voice with prestige! I’m here!”
“Are you kidding me?” the Baron yelled. Voice mimicry was a very high-cost wish. The difference between the sound of your own voice and someone else’s was significant, and it usually wasn’t worth the prestige to cross that gap. A false voice often bought you only a few moments of confusion. In general, simple silence was preferred over illusory sounds.
Yet Schuler had just mimicked the Baron for a brief tactical advantage. He was already coming, and a series of wooden cracks were emanating from the center of the building. The invincible man was likely punching his way through a light, hollow panel door, while Schuler was surely catching up from somewhere. Every direction was a potential threat, so no direction was preferable except forward and out. He followed Enzu’s directions to the end.
“If you don’t find me, come here!” the Baron yelled, turning left at the end of the hall. Past the corner, there were offices marked with the names of various secular administrators and tax officials. Most were shut. One door was propped open by the corpse of a CPUSA man with a claw hammer buried in his neck and a wooden wall recently painted with arterial jets of blood.
Enzu must’ve killed this man without getting a drop on his clothes. What class of killer had the Baron saved at the East River Docks?
“Murder Incorporated,” d’Holbach muttered, stepping carefully over the legs of the corpse and into the office. In the secular world, that band of hitmen had succumbed to law enforcement in ‘41, but there’d been rumors about their continuation. Even Phyllis—in the role of a secular gangster—had worried about them back in Crown Heights.
Now Enzu was not only claiming to be ex-Murder Inc, but he was showing the talents of a long career in finding men and turning them into bodies. Had he retired back before the war? Or had he been a member in some new group until much more recently?
It was too late to ask, and ultimately, it didn’t matter. Old killers threw around the names of death squads, and young killers quailed like every word had the weight and strength of fine steel. Maybe it was all a story. Maybe it was real. It hardly mattered to the dead, and the Baron needed to find that window before he joined their number.
There was a large office window shaded with wooden slat blinds, facing the street towards Union Square Park. The Baron squeezed into cover, putting his back against the gap between the window and a tall bookshelf full of legal tomes and printed journals. He tugged a pull string to raise the blinds.
Bleak spring sunlight struck the room at a near-vertical angle, illuminating the otherwise darkened office. The Baron peeked around the edge of the windowsill. There was a dead man in a suit lying on the curb next to an abandoned car with a shattered windshield. The driver’s side door was open, and both front wheels were missing. There were no tires, no rims, just bare axle mounts and a hood planted against the asphalt. Broken with a wish? Probably.
Further afield, cracks of gunfire echoed across the empty spaces and vacant streets, bouncing off flat facades and multiplying the sounds. For fear of bullets, nobody crossed the park’s main walkways or the open stone plazas on the north end. Instead, the fighting was concentrated in the southern half of Union Square, amidst several groves of vivid green trees, hemmed up between low dark walls of stone and waxy-leafed hedges.
There weren’t piles of bodies in any one spot, nor any obvious firing positions, but the cracks of gunfire suggested that somewhere in that tangle of greenery, around the old statue of Washington and the towering copper-clad pole of the Independence Flagstaff, desperate men were still shooting to prevent other men from shooting back.
Of course, there were some corpses. At least five lay in view in the main north-south boulevard that separated the east and west sides of the park’s greenery. If the Baron risked a closer look, he could probably find more.
This was a terrible spot to depart Tammany Hall, but he doubted the entrances would be any safer, and there was at least a wrecked car here for some cover.
The window had a lock on the top of the frame, but it opened on a swing hinge and wouldn’t leave enough room for him to squeeze through. He glanced around, looking for something to quickly knock out the glass and clear the frame of shards.
There was a short step ladder for the bookshelves. The Baron picked it up by the top step, drew in a deep breath, and swung the legs at the window.
“Bounce!”
The step ladder bounced off the glass like the Baron had struck rubber, nearly whipping out of his hands. He staggered once, casting a wild glance back over his shoulder.
Meister Schuler was standing on the far side of the bloodied CPUSA corpse, smiling pleasantly. His hair was far messier and full of dust now, and the glove on his right hand was missing. “My dear devil!” he cried, meeting the Baron’s wide eyes.
That wish couldn’t last long. The Baron swung again, and the step ladder bounced again. He readied a third swing.
“I’m no threat,” Schuler added. “Give me a moment to explain—”
The Baron swung again, ready for a third bounce, but the step ladder passed through the window with a crisp crash, loosening arm-length shards of glass to rain upon the indoors and outdoors alike. Each falling piece flashed in the sunlight like clear ice, cutting the air like swords before striking and shattering into countless daggers. d’Holbach held onto the stepladder, watching the razor edges splash across the windowsill about a foot from his bare hands.
Schuler huffed as the sound dissipated. “Baron, please.”
d’Holbach swept the edge of the short ladder along the bottom of the windowsill, knocking out the last knives of glass. There was enough room to vault out. He turned and heaved the ladder at Schuler, who dismissed it with a silent wave of his right hand, destroying the wood like someone had struck it with a metal bat.
“Will you listen?” the Diviner asked seriously.
The Baron stared at the most powerful man on the continent. “What, no threats?” he asked, shifting his weight and scooting closer to the windowsill. He’d vault quickly, then try to land into cover behind the ruined vehicle.
“Not from me,” Schuler said.
The Baron scooted right up to the edge of the window frame, glancing towards it meaningfully. “Who from then?”
Schuler pointed at the broken window, at the sporadic gunfire in the park. “Them. You can’t go outside unprepared. You’re stuck in here, with me, a little longer.”
The Baron hesitated, pressing his back to the wall and looking carefully at Meister Schuler. Still in black clothes, all business except for those lustrous copper frames. He didn’t look crazy. He looked both focused and completely at ease after brawling with the Zombie. It was worth a few seconds to ask this version of Schuler, “What do you mean?”
Schuler smiled. “Thank you, Baron! You’re finally listening to me. Words fail to convey the danger of this situation, so allow me to demonstrate.” He marched across the office, scurried around the manager’s desk, and swept aside the shards of glass with a sweep of his boot.
Then, flourishing his bare hand like a talented composer drawing out the pause, he stepped out into the narrow slice of daylight, cast by the high midday sun.
There was a wet thwip sound. It reminded the Baron of the Zombie slinging a rock into thick mud. Schuler bodily jolted, and a second later, the crack of a high velocity hunting rifle sounded across the park. The Baron flinched at the noise, and then realized that there was a tidy pucker on Schuler’s chest, left side. Over his heart.
“Schuler?” the Baron asked.
The Diviner raised a finger and rasped with only his right lung, “Lub,” then pointed out of the window. “Dub!” As if called forth, arterial blood heartily gushed from the chest wound, spilling over his dark clothes. He clapped a hand over the fatal puncture, stumbling back into the darkness of the office and coating his bare right hand in bright crimson—and then stopped, standing perfectly still. A moment passed; no fresh gushes behind closed fingers.
“Fuck,” the Baron cussed, lacking any other way to express the sheer terrifying display of power that Meister Schuler had committed in front of him.
The Diviner turned his head towards the Baron, smiling. “You understand now. They’re looking for runners, even while we struggle to uproot them from the hedges.” His voice was clear, unbothered. He lifted his bloody hand, revealing neither wound nor even damage to his shirt.
“You could’ve told me,” the Baron uttered. “I would’ve believed.”
“You, Doubting Henry? Believed? Ha! The only temple you worship is the cave wall.” Schuler strode over to the bookshelf, looking over the titles quickly. With his gloved hand, he pulled one off of a high shelf, then promptly slid it into a different spot on a low shelf. “The situation is changing rapidly,” he explained, scanning more tomes. Another book went to another spot. Then he relaxed, spreading his hands before the simple rearrangement like he’d completed a work of art. “Hansel found his crumbs, you see?”
The Baron’s heart hammered in his chest. The Diviner was casually spending enough prestige to dismiss fatal wounds, and why? To intimidate the Baron? To make him comply?
At least d’Holbach knew what the crumbs were. “You mean microtasks.”
Schuler patted a row of books with his bloody hand, leaving palm prints on the spines of several tax volumes. “Micro and otherwise. Any task is a guide to the gods’ will.” He glanced over at the Baron. “This is why I’m here first. You wouldn’t have listened if the Zombie were close. He would’ve swung at me, and I never could’ve made my point.”
“What point?” the Baron asked, vaguely irritated with the Diviner’s occult grandstanding. “I don’t understand the metaphor. Hansel was lost in the woods after a bird ate the breadcrumbs.”
As quick as a gunshot, Schuler exploded into laughter, turning towards the Baron and opening his arms as if to hug him, then thinking better of it, dropping his hands to his pants. “I’m the bird then! They call me cuckoo, after all! Ha-ha!”
The moment wasn’t remotely funny, which made the Baron wonder if Schuler was either mocking him or enjoying a moment of madman’s mirth. Another chuckle emerged from the Diviner, playfully arguing with a somber mood punctuated by gunfire.
At this rate, between Schuler and the snipers around the building, there was no way out of this room without help. “Zombie!” the Baron yelled. “I’m here!”
Schuler nodded at the Baron’s sudden shouting. “We do need him. However, we shouldn’t make too many cries. CPUSA is still in the building.”
“All the more reason to call for the Zombie.”
“Mm.” Schuler looked up, tipping his head around like someone looking for a radio signal. “Seven more mercenaries are in the main hall with the rest of the staff. Six, if…” The Diviner trailed off, eyes unfocused, and he raised the bloody hand for silence.
The Baron tipped an ear towards the building, checking if he could hear anything, or if this was a reaction from Schuler to an occult event.
There was a distant but substantial snap of shattering wood. The sound seemed to come from across the hall, but Baron couldn’t see any offices there, only old walls made of rough bricks. These bottom floor rooms had been built around the end of the last century. No cheap partition walls. “Is that—” the Baron wondered aloud.
“Shh!” Schuler interrupted, waving a bloody finger to negate the question, even as his expression remained slack. His eyes drifted down to the hardwood floor in front of the window. In the shadows, glass shards captured the diffuse glow of reflected sunlight.
A fresh CPUSA mercenary sidestepped into view in the hallway, framed by the open office door, holding a revolver in his hand. He aimed at the back of Schuler’s head over the exsanguinated corpse of his comrade. “Surrender,” he ordered.
Schuler gestured forward with his bloody hand.
There was a single, audible click of a pistol part snapping, instantly followed by a massive roar of shattering masonry. A long stretch of the bricks behind the merc jumped forward like a blanket tossed over someone’s back, overlapping and crashing down on a human body with the combined force of a half-ton of fired clay. Promptly crushed. Not even a scream.
The sweep of clattering bricks rolled outward from the point of impact, knocking over the old corpse in the doorway and scattering along the hall. The Baron stared in mute horror while a cloud of brick dust rose from the settling wreckage, flowing into the room. The smells of clay and lime filled his nostrils, dry and irritating.
Beyond the wreckage, through the hole in the wall, a large office was visible. Four desks were arranged for a team of clerks, flanked on either side by banks of tall filing cabinets. Along the far wall, an antique wooden door lurked in the dusty gloom.
Schuler lowered his hand and raised his head. “Thank you for your patience. I was elsewhere.” He glanced around, sniffing the dusty air. “Apologies for the mess. I needed to clear the way.”
“Clear the way?” the Baron asked. “You just killed a man.”
“Who, the corpse in the door?” Schuler glanced back over one shoulder at the fallen bricks. “Oh. There was another man.” He squinted, deeply confused by the accident he’d engineered moments before. “Hmm.” He pointed past the wreckage to the antique wooden door. “Didn’t mean to kill anyone. I was just opening the wall for him.”
The moment his sentence finished, there was a sledgehammer bang against the office door across the hall, and an antique handle burst out of its housing.
The Baron’s heart soared with relief. “Zombie, is that you?”
“Yeah! I’m here!” the Zombie shouted back.
“I’m with Schuler! Don’t worry, I’m safe!”
“With Schuler?” the Zombie yelled. Wood crunched twice as an invincible human fist barged through latch mechanisms and mounting screws, finally knocking the door inward on its hinges. The Zombie strode wide-eyed into the office across from them, still clasping the Cat o’ Nine Lives in his left hand. His shirt was no longer tucked in and was missing all of the buttons over his stomach, and one of his leather shoes was completely gone. “I heard the wall crash and came running.” His gaze darted around. “Are you a prisoner?”
“I don’t know,” the Baron admitted. “I think he wants to help.”
Meister Schuler chuckled kindly, like an odd uncle sharing a delightful surprise with his nephews. “My dear devils, I’m sparing no expense, not now. We’re in this together.”
The Zombie stumbled over the brick pile and its buried corpses, glancing both ways along the hall before crossing into the office with d’Holbach and Schuler. “You knocked me over until I fell through the floor,” the Zombie complained. “Were you faking his voice?”
“Yes,” Schuler answered.
“So you were fucking with me after you saved your people?”
Schuler grinned at the Zombie. “I needed a moment alone with the Baron. To show a threat, and to prove a point.” He patted the nigh-invisible stain over his black-clad chest, briefly rewetting the darkening layer of blood on his right hand. “Shot in the heart, then healed, you see. I won’t die so long as I have prestige.”
The Zombie furrowed his brow. “Schuler, I have no inner life. I don’t know what emotions feel like, and this body can’t suffer pain. But I swear to all the gods of this Earth, you’re more frustrating than being poked in the eye. Repeatedly.”
“A fine compliment, but time is brief.” The Diviner wrinkled his nose, adjusting his bifocals upwards. “Would you kindly feed the Cat o’ Nine Lives to the Baron?”
d’Holbach’s brain hitched for a moment. It wasn’t that he’d never considered swallowing the Cat, but it wasn’t a particularly good idea either. If he swallowed it, delivering it to Denisov would require pulling it out of his own stomach lining—on a city street or at an airport—without any prestige on hand to heal the injury. Of course, Denisov had every reason to quickly treat him, but there weren’t any guarantees.
And while he wasn’t going to openly defy the Diviner here, the Baron wasn’t above asking very necessary questions either. “Is that wise? If I swallow the Cat, that’s a fresh reason to kill me. Nine of them, to be specific.”
Schuler grunted. “Of course it’s wise. It’s a blessing from the gods.”
“They’re not gods,” the Baron replied curtly, “and the Cat is a tool.”
Schuler shook his head and shuffled towards d’Holbach, as if closing the distance to receive a confession. Even without the cassock, he appeared priestly, bearing the cocksure confidence of a man who had seen their own salvation in a cup of red wine. “Baron,” he murmured softly, “why don’t you believe in the gods?”
“I’ve answered this question a thousand times,” the Baron replied.
“Indulge me?”
“Anything can be powerful without being divine. No event could ever convince me otherwise. You call them miracles? I call them artificial—engineered somehow. The whole world is a system of physical parts. I believe it encompasses everything.”
Schuler tapped the bloody spot over his heart. “This power doesn’t count as divinity?”
“Let me answer your question with a question. Do you worship the state?”
The Diviner smirked. “America? No.”
“Of course you don’t,” the Baron said. “Power doesn’t deserve your faith. It demands accountability. The same applies here. When the so-called gods interfere, I think we should hold them to a higher standard. I say, ignore their evil tasks; adhere only to what’s good. I say, let’s correct their unjust system. That’s what I think when I see their miracles. That’s where my heart goes.”
The Zombie grinned. “My friend may be a madman, but he’s striving like mad for a better world. Who cares what he believes?”
Schuler smiled along with the Zombie, but his next words were addressed to the only mortal man in the room. “Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach. Even if you don’t believe in the gods, would you be surprised to learn that the gods believe in you?”
It was a ridiculous question for an absurd moment. In the silence that followed, two guns were fired in Union Square Park. With every passing second, people died, not just here but everywhere. The world turned onwards, and streams of little, meaningless actions poured together into broader historical flows. Decisions were made in government offices, atomic bombs were built in factory lines, and through the sum of all human efforts, civilization teetered ever closer to ruin. The Doomsday clock offered only seconds to midnight.
Yet the only way forward was through, not just this moment of insane questioning, but across that park and out into the broader conflicts of the age.
“What does that mean to you?” the Baron asked.
Schuler pointed out the shattered window, towards a street beyond the park trees, visible only as a line cut between rising buildings, heading west. “There, like a beacon of possibilities, a task has been set. Escort the Baron to that spot. Alive.” He let his hand drop, staring at the breadth of contested land between here and there. “It’ll be worth every ounce of force to bring you there, but the fighters outside won’t respect your Pact. They’ll kill every occult foe and retrieve the Cat o’ Nine Lives, or they’ll die trying. So let’s save two madmen with one stone, eh? Swallow the Cat. Guarantee your survival, and the gods and I will deliver you from this battlefield. Then you’ll have your last chance at saving the world or dying a martyr for its future.”
“Who is the second madman?” the Baron asked.
Schuler placed his hand on his chest. “What happened to that keen power of observation, my dear devil? It’s myself, of course. If you don’t survive today, the Zombie will kill me first. He hates me, and rightly so. I’ve threatened everything he loves.”
The Zombie took a long, deep breath. He normally didn’t breathe unless he was about to speak, and technically, he couldn’t feel physical pain, but there was a possibility that the Baron had often considered but never confirmed, for it’d embarrass the Zombie to ask. If the Zombie could feel fear? Loneliness? Agonies of the heart? Then he might need to take a deep breath now and then, imitating calm to ease the dull ache of stress.
“Friend,” the Zombie said, raising his left hand and the Cat o’ Nine Lives. “He’s right. They’re shooting at silhouettes out there, not at men. Hold out your hand.”
The Baron held out his hand, palm up. Delicately, as if there was nothing more precious in the world, the Zombie placed the sculpture in d’Holbach’s palm. The Cat was unusually cold and heavy, curled up and smooth. “Are you sure?” the Baron asked.
“I am,” the Zombie said. “Once the rest of the world realizes that CPUSA is out for blood, they’ll stop caring about the Pact.” He frowned, gently patting the back of the Baron’s wrist, lingering only a moment before withdrawing. “I won’t deny the gods today. Swallow it.”
“Atomic bomb logic?” the Baron asked. He brought the Cat close to himself. It was black and smooth, about as large as a walnut, and an obvious choking hazard.
“Yes. We’re on the verge of an apocalypse.”
“The stakes are indeed that high,” Schuler murmured.
The Baron closed his hand around the Cat. It never warmed, not even in a clenched fist. Like most prehistorical artifacts, its properties were wholly anomalous. Basic thermodynamics appeared to fail around it, if only because it’d been crafted in a time of profound ignorance. What seemed beyond possibility now was once obvious and simple in the metaphysics of primitive man. Something could “just be” cold if you didn’t know better. Something could “just be” always clean, incredibly tough, and capable of sustaining the dead.
The Cat was extremely old, far older than the proto-Slavic culture that had rediscovered it. Nobody had been able to afford the wish for the knowledge of its origins. Like many of the world’s most powerful artifacts, it was far older than recorded history, coming out of the same silent eon as the Zombie himself. Somewhen between the emergence of homo sapiens and the birth of civilization, there’d been a golden age of harmony between man and the gods.
This power had come to the modern world out of that Atlantis, that Lemuria, that Mu, that blessed Land of Fire that fell by the Zombie’s hand, that first age of ziggurats and sacrifices and pre-Biblical wars and the summoning of meteors on the eve of battle, and every other divine intervention encoded into myth and legend so that the world might remember a taste of ancient truth.
One of the primary rules of the system of prestige was that no wish could resurrect the dead, but here was the nearest thing to an exception. The Baron could only swallow it once. If it went in his mouth again after today, it would just be a chilly stone.
“If I swallow this,” the Baron said, “we’ll have to cut it out without prestige.”
“It won’t be a fatal wound for you,” the Zombie said. “You nearly lost your arm once.”
“I remember.”
“We sewed it tight and there’s not even a scar now. You can take a lot more punishment before a wound is fatal. The gods have made you tougher than the rest.”
The Baron smiled wanly. “Remember when I lost my pinky to the second knuckle?”
“Yeah, and it grew back after a year or two. Neither age, illness, nor injury can take you. Trust me. You’ll be okay, so swallow it. For my sake, friend, swallow it.”
The Baron took a deep breath. He was in a nearly unique position to swallow the Cat and survive its loss. He’d endured the slow grind of time because the so-called gods always repaired him. They would save him from this as well, as long as the wound didn’t kill him quickly. Still, he hesitated. It’d be so much easier if it weren’t inside of him, in need of surgery.
“Elizabeth would do it if she were here,” the Zombie added.
The Baron laughed at the emotional incision of that comment. If there was anyone the Baron admired for strength and cunning, it was her. “She’s the only other person who could do it. Also, thank you for calling her Elizabeth for once.”
“Swallow it,” Schuler insisted. “We must leave soon.”
The Baron rubbed his fingers on the Cat. It felt sticky against human skin, as if it wanted to help him hold it. He lifted it towards the Zombie briefly. “Cheers!”
The Zombie smiled. “A toast to our coming victory. Drink from the cup of life.”
The Baron put the Cat o’ Nine Lives in his mouth.
Schuler jerked like a mule had kicked him in the jaw. He covered his ears, writhed and shouted, “Orchestra!” as if he were trapped in a pit full of deafening instruments.
The Baron tried to move his tongue, to reorient the little statue in his mouth for easier swallowing, but he couldn’t. It was made with purpose. It had energy. He tried to spit it out so he could start over, but that too was impossible. The Cat’s stickiness was one-way. When the Baron’s gag reflex pushed back, when his palate pressed against the cold sculpture, it stuck fast to his tongue. When the reflex automatically pulled back, readying for another thrust, the Cat slid down with it. A horrible gagging sound erupted from his throat, then was plugged.
It wasn’t merely like choking. The Baron was choking.
His eyes watered, and his diaphragm convulsed uselessly. Like a barbed quill, movement only forced the Cat deeper. His throat stretched painfully around its icy exterior. His stomach tried to squeeze, but the Cat refused to depart. Down, down, down it went.
Finally, the sculpture passed his trachea, and a breath jerked its way into his lungs, and he began coughing and retching.
Schuler was on his knees now, ears uncovered, head tilted up in awe. “The music! Beautiful music!” He blinked, squeezing tears from his eyes, wetting the lustrous copper frames where they touched his nose. “Ancient spells, singing in the air! My gods!”
The Cat was well down the Baron’s esophagus now. He tried to vomit, and it felt as if his throat swelled with acid, but the pressure of expulsion couldn’t move the Cat. Irrationally, the Baron feared he would burst. The Cat held steady, a cold lump.
“Does it hurt?” the Zombie asked.
The Baron nodded rapidly. Not only did his stomach ache, but the Cat was beginning to warm up. Body temperature could hardly compare with its searing surface. It sank smoothly towards the depths of his belly, burning away all other sensations. It slipped into his stomach, and for a second, the Baron knew it was boiling hot. He let out his breath in a squeal of pain, then burped literal steam. The Cat was cooking a hole in his stomach lining, destroying tissue and nerves and attaching itself like his flesh was melted wax.
Then, just as suddenly, pain ended. In the nest of the Baron’s intestines, the Cat o’ Nine Lives finally found a place to nap. “Burned,” the Baron groaned. “My stomach.”
There was no doubt that the temperature had been real. Its warmth was still cooking out of the Baron’s belly, as if he’d chugged a whole bowl of scalding soup. However, Schuler was correct. The burned tissues were recovering supernaturally fast. Whatever had been done to install the Cat o’ Nine Lives was over. It began to feel right, natural, even comfortable. It felt like a part of the Baron, and it scared him that the artifact could so clearly modify his chemistry to relieve his anxiety. Then he stopped feeling scared.
“Quiet again,” Schuler said, closing his eyes. “I can hear the planet now. Whisper. Whisper Earth.” A rifle shot outside didn’t disturb his newfound peace.
“Protected for now,” the Zombie judged.
The Baron placed a hand over his belly, fully aware of the Cat’s presence. It was a cool stone, napping inside him, waiting for a lethal hour.
Ten lives and nine safe deaths remained.
Author’s Note:
And so, the Baron has acquired the right to die and live again.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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The Zombie tossed the bowler up and caught it on his brow before tugging it down by the brim. He was glad the hat had survived the blast, though he doubted it’d make it through the afternoon. His invincibility didn’t extend to his clothes, but they were often incidentally preserved through the same miracles that protected his body. If a bullet phased through him, it often phased through his suit without damaging it.
The question was—how would his shirt or pants stand up to the Green Dragon Crescent Blade? That rainbow-slash was thoroughly destructive, and he didn’t want to loot another dead body. He planned to dodge the cuts as best as he could, if only because that was a fun game, but if he were lucky, his clothes might survive one or two incidental blows.
If they didn’t? Well, he’d just steal what he needed so he could walk the streets without drawing attention from the cops. Nudity was extremely funny, but it was uncivilized and caused too many problems for the Baron. Under these occult circumstances, it’d probably be easier to get away with murder than walking shirtless along a Manhattan road.
With the Cat in his left hand and General Osman’s orders at his back, it was time to sweep the rest of the floor. Given the dead merc’s position, it was probable that CPUSA had used magical silence to infiltrate the temple itself. When High Oracle Gagliano had declared its desecration, a New York cultist had already died. A shot in the dark? Maybe a slit throat. Only the Zombie could safely scout forward now and flush out a well-prepared enemy.
He smiled and trotted a little further down the hall, stopping at each door to look far into each lounge, office, and sitting room. Across three rooms, nothing happened; no sounds emerged, and nothing interesting was discovered beyond scattered debris.
“Is it clear?” Osman called from beyond the edge of the door.
“Not yet!” the Zombie yelled.
“Hurry up! We’re ready to move!”
The Zombie approached the fourth room on the left side, which had already been struck through by the previous slash, and he found another corpse, headless and missing an arm. The Zombie stopped and whistled, marveling at the victim’s bad luck. This merc had crouched down into cover, just inside the open door, and that’d been a perfect angle to catch the rainbow-arc right below his throat, cleanly severing through neck and collarbone.
“Zed, sighting left again,” Mr. Roach called faintly, still lying down in the main hall and watching events over the iron sights of his rifle. The man must have excellent vision, to deduce that much from the Zombie’s body language alone.
The invincible man grabbed the damaged door jamb with his right hand and leaned into the room, curious if the merc’s loose head had struck the back wall. The result was better than expected—the head, arm, and most of a shoulder had sailed clean across the break room and landed in a steel sink, where they’d mixed with debris from a shattered cabinet. But that detail was quickly forgotten, as something far more interesting moved in the dim.
Two living CPUSA mercs were crouching behind an upturned table, yelling in complete silence into a radio, as if pantomiming terrified shouts.
The Zombie grinned. They’d wished for their own special silence, which nobody else could hear. “That’s expensive,” he noted pleasantly, interrupting their hidden report.
Both mercs jerked and swiveled towards him, mouths hanging open in inaudible screams. One of them pointed a gun at the Zombie, and then their wish for silence ran out of time.
The other one was yelling into a hand radio, “Zed detected! We need orders! We need—”
“Left, full room!” Mr. Roach declared, quite a bit louder.
“—help! Fuck!” the merc finished yelling, then dropped to the floor.
The armed merc pushed to his feet, sprinting for the door. Right at the Zombie.
The invincible man grinned and tightened his grip on the jamb. “Brave,” he judged, as the running merc desperately threw himself at the scant gap between the Zombie’s left arm and the damaged door.
A distant martial cry heralded a fresh arc of violet light, cutting across the break room from wall to wall.
The running merc jammed his body into the space between the Zombie and the door—and the Zombie simply thrust his body leftwards using his right arm, pinning the merc between his invincible shoulder and the doorjamb. Ribs instantly creaked, popping then snapping like overcooked wishbones. This crush prevented any escape.
“No!” the man shrieked in agony, as the world flashed cannon-blast green just behind him. The break room split along a fresh shockwave, wrecking walls and cabinets, destroying the overturned tabletop, and severing off a heavy slab of door with enough force to clip the back of the trapped merc’s head and leave his neck bent at a dead angle. Eyes instantly lost focus. Dead as a nail, even after dodging the rainbow-slash.
Red light faded away, and jade confetti rained over the second merc in the room. He’d lived, diving beneath the slash, but he was half-trapped beneath a fallen slab of hardwood tabletop. Groans of pain were audible despite the general crumbling and clattering of debris.
The Zombie released the dead man from his shoulder check and strode through the wreckage of the break room, angling towards the survivor. “Hey, asshole! Alive down there?”
The living merc yelled beneath the remains of the breakroom table, wordless and defiant.
The Zombie kicked the heavy wooden plank with the tip of his leather shoe. The toe box crushed instantly, but his invincible foot launched the damaged tabletop with a spray of splinters. Once freed, his next victim started squirming, clawing away from the inevitable danger with one bloodied hand.
This CPUSA merc was younger than most, somewhere in his late thirties—probably a recent acquisition of the Worker’s Party, inducted right before the Smith Act trials.
“Some die young,” the Zombie judged, kneeling down beside the squirming man. “But not as young as the children your boys killed yesterday.”
“What?” the merc rasped.
The Zombie bunched up the back of the man’s collar in his fist, twisting it up tight until the merc groaned, and then he lifted him bodily from the debris and damaged wood, shaking off a light clatter of jade fragments amidst bits of plaster and lath. “Your comrades killed children,” he repeated. “And nobody is asking me to spare your life.”
Blood was running down the merc’s limp right arm. He gurgled, not quite choking because the top button of his uniform was open. After the last slash, he could still move, but he was weak, almost floppy. Injured back, perhaps? But not yet dead. “Fuck you,” he spat, disrespecting the Zombie moments before his demise.
“You don’t think you’re responsible,” the Zombie observed, dragging the merc bodily out of the open door and into the main hall. “I’ll have to make an example.”
“Fuck you,” the merc repeated, even as his boots dragged across the carpet.
The Zombie lifted the man’s collar, holding him at arm’s length, like a dangling, freshly-butchered side of beef. “Armies don’t operate on responsibility. Do they?”
“Fuck… you,” the merc whimpered a third time.
The Zombie snickered, waving to Mr. Roach with his left arm, holding the Cat. Then he shouted loudly, so that all the floor could hear him: “Armies are killed, one bloody soldier at a time! If you don’t run, you will die today! Like this! General, center hall! Sever the body!”
A vertical arc of violet light surged out from the side of the hallway at an oblique angle, travelling as fast as an arrow’s flight while leaving behind vast bands of sapphire blue and sky-bright cyan. For an instant, colors flowed smoothly towards the standing edge of the slash, some meters behind the Zombie. A near miss, so the Zombie dodged towards the slash, dragging his dangling victim into its vertical plane. The merc screamed, intersecting the rainbow.
Loudly bright, the color of spring exploded through the air—the slash tickled the Zombie’s palm—and an unrecognizable wash of pulped flesh was torn from the Zombie’s grip and thrown loosely back onto the hallway floor.
Hat gone again. Shirt hem fluttering on the shockwave. The Zombie roared with laughter, shaking the gore off his right hand and looking around for the corpse. He found only scattered limbs on either side of the fading red arc, nearly unrecognizable as anything other than leaky meat and chipped bone. The rainbow vanished, and jade fragments fluttered through the empty air in mute celebration. Most of the magical force had gone into a single human body, folding it vertically in half. Instant death for the killers of children and their comrades. “You should see this!” he shouted at any remaining mercenaries. “He’s hamburger!”
The Zombie threatened his enemies for two reasons. First and foremost, it was fun, but second, fear had tactical significance. He hoped to pin the mercs in place or force a retreat.
For a full second, no response came.
Then all at once, eleven CPUSA mercenaries swarmed out of various lounges and rooms, converging into a single mass while running at full sprint towards the Zombie. No orders were passed between the mercs. Occult silence had obscured any prior coordination. Boots hammered across carpets, heads angled down, and desperate eyes peered forward—towards victory or death. They clutched a variety of guns to their bellies.
Instead of falling one after another to a magical superweapon, they’d chosen to launch a final assault on a superior foe.
“Incoming!” the Zombie bellowed.
“Pierce!” Mr. Roach yelled in turn, almost certainly applying a second or two of altered properties to the rifle cartridges in his Garand.
The Zombie tried to throw himself in front of the bulk of the group, arms wide, but there wasn’t anything to grab onto with his right hand. He couldn’t secure his footing.
The merc at the head of the charge lowered his shoulder and rammed bodily into the Zombie, a suicidal tackle. With a wet crunch, both skull and shoulder folded against the Zombie’s chest, but dead weight swept into him, carrying him off his feet and onto his back. The floor itself cracked open to catch him in a fold of torn carpeting and broken planks, only stopping his momentum against the creaking joists below. The dead body sprawled on him, twitching.
Then ten surviving mercs swarmed past the Zombie, and gunfire erupted.
The Baron was well-clear of the sightlines when he heard the telltale crunch of the Zombie smashing through copious amounts of wood.
Meister Schuler took one step left, then squatted, and the first shots of the battle sailed past and above him, peppering the back of the main hall.
Lt. Sadgrove frowned, positioning himself to the left of the Diviner.
Mr. Roach fired his Garand. The crack of ignition was clearly supersonic, and the kick of the rifle was hard enough to punch Mr. Roach’s shoulder back like he’d fired a buffalo round. A pair of heavy crashes signalled bodies stumbling mid-run and falling to the floor.
More gunfire returned in earnest, peppering in through the open doors, and Mr. Roach simply stared into the fusillade, fearlessly adjusting his aim on the ironsights. “Pierce!” he barked again, pulling the trigger. Another explosive shot signalled another pair of falling bodies.
“Four down!” Sadgrove declared. Then a moment later, “Grenade!”
A Mk II fragmentation grenade—a genuine WWII pineapple, green-grey cast iron—flew in through the doors and bounced exactly once off the carpet before the Baron finished turning to dive to the ground. He landed, hands behind his head, a reaction that’d saved his life twice before.
“Away!” Schuler shouted. It was the last word audible before the thunder crack of the grenade’s explosion and the sharp hailstorm of scattering shrapnel.
“Get up, Baron!” Osman shouted.
“A pleasure to see our wizard at work,” Lt. Sadgrove muttered.
d’Holbach raised his head. There was no sign of any damage to the room. Nobody else had moved, though Sgt. Wade had flinched away from the main doors.
“What?” the Baron asked, turning over to look at the others. Mr. Roach was still lying in plain view, watching the hall with his rifle. Schuler was squatting, and Lt. Sadgrove was alongside him, staring into the hall. Sgt. Wade was cringing, clutching his Tommy with his back to the right wall. General Osman was posing again, preparing another magic slash—this one would have the angles of a horizontal arc.
Sadgrove met the Baron’s gaze. “Schuler handled it.”
“How?” the Baron asked.
“It bounced back into the hall.”
General Osman shouted a war cry, then swung twice, releasing two horizontal rainbows in quick succession—one at chest height and one angled down towards distant knees, sweeping out both sides of the hall at two elevations. Claps of green-thunder echoed as portions of the building were slashed inwards, irreparably cutting loose vast sheets of plaster and lath. Secondary cracks followed even as the first booms echoed; these were the glassy implosions of cathode ray tubes. Two dozen falling televisions had just shattered against the floor.
“Holy shit! Holy shit!” Wade yelled as the rolling blastwaves cleared, leaving behind the hideous sound of crumbling walls deeper into the building.
“A fair price for a clear floor!” Osman replied heartily.
Schuler grunted. “One survivor. Lieutenant, may I puppet you?”
“Yes, Diviner,” Lt. Sadgrove replied.
Schuler wobbled into place beside the old soldier, then grabbed his wrist behind the Luger and aimed him at a stretch of crumbling lath planks. For a moment, they showed the combined grace of a drunk trying to adjust the arm of a marionette, but whenever Schuler briefly released him, Sadgrove’s hand locked steadily in place.
After a few more tweaks, the Diviner paused arbitrarily. “There! Last on the floor, whispering miracles. Fire at will.” He released Sadgrove’s wrist.
The Lieutenant sniffed airily. “Walls as spacious as air,” he said, and he fired the Luger. The shot seemed to go nowhere, hitting no visible surface, but a heartbeat later, Baron could hear a soft thud. After a moment, he realized that he’d heard a body falling.
“You’ve perfected shooting people through walls?” the Baron asked.
“My specialty, Baron,” Lt. Sadgrove murmured proudly. “A technique, inspired by the Rutherford model, spread to the public by science-fiction. I’ll use it while people believe.”
Schuler wobbled backwards a couple of steps, losing focus. “Dead in seconds.”
“Thank you, Diviner.” Lt. Sadgrove holstered his Luger at his waist.
Schuler waved at Osman, wrinkling his nose to keep his bifocals adjusted. “Send the Zombie ahead to be sure, but we can move at will, General.”
General Osman planted the gold counterweight against the floor. “Zombie!” he shouted, cupping a hand over his mouth. “Scout us to the stairs!”
There was a thud. “Got it!”
Osman grinned, enjoying this degree of cooperation from the invincible man. “If you find anyone still living, bring them here! I’ll make ‘em squeal!”
“Can do!” yelled the Zombie, audibly shedding a portion of shattered wood like someone dumping damaged lumber onto a burn pile.
The Baron grimaced, standing up and brushing off his pants. “Are you asking him to bring you torture victims?”
General Osman faced the Baron with disbelief. “Are you complaining about my protection, kraut?”
“Torture doesn’t teach anything,” the Baron argued.
General Osman scowled. “You’re not in any position to order me around. You’re a prisoner, and damn lucky one. Without me, these dogs would have you.”
The Baron scowled right back at one of the most influential leaders on the continent. “People lie to stop the pain, you know. Torture misleads men.”
“I’m not interested in your mad theories, philosopher.”
“You’re asking my Zombie to commit horrible crimes. I’m telling you to stop.”
General Osman released a cough-laugh, a sound of sheer disbelief. “That devil?” he asked. “The one who burned my men in Salem, laughing while they screamed?”
The Baron felt a surge of indignant rage. Salem had haunted him for decades; this cult had held him responsible throughout New England, making him beg for letters of passage while demanding that he check in with every vassal cult before they worked. A flurry of barbed words swept through him, but only one phrase found its way through the wall of his willpower. He couldn’t help himself. “Do you think I liked Salem?” he asked bitterly.
“What?” Osman replied.
“Do you think I wanted him to hold men to the fire?”
“You let him loose—”
“A mistake!” the Baron shouted. “Do not ask my man to torture people for you! Call him back for my defense, and use your own men!”
The General sneered. “Absolutely not, Baron. I’m not giving you any tools, nor bringing your devil to me. You will not be trusted so readily.”
“Agreed,” Lt. Sadgrove murmured.
The General gestured with his free hand at the folded wreckage of the double doors, now twice split by the broad slashes that’d cleared the entire second floor. The hall ahead offered the only navigable route. “This arrangement continues, both for your safety and ours. Now walk, Baron, and tell your Zombie to check the dead. For your safety.”
The Baron glowered, but he knew he had no power to alter events. “Zombie!” he called out into the hall, seeing only scattered corpses and debris and nothing of his invincible friend. “Be thorough! We’re walking out now!”
The Zombie stepped out of a side room, kicking over a load of wooden debris onto the collapsed torso of a mercenary, recently separated from its legs. He cast them a thumbs up, grinning. “I’ve counted the dead! You’re clear!”
Osman leered. “Did you match their parts?”
“I counted heads!” the Zombie replied.
“Haha! He is a good soldier, I’ll give him that!” Osman cheered. “Go on then, Baron. Move, before the enemy bars our way again.”
Pops of gunfire could be heard softly through the outer walls. Even if they’d slain a squad or two on this floor, the broader battle was still growing. New York’s soldiers would be returning to the area, CPUSA would be fighting them in the park, and the National Guard were certain to make a move soon. Time was genuinely scarce.
Without further complaint, the Baron strode forward into the hall. The first thing he noted was a couple of dead CPUSA mercs, face down on the carpeting, which was wicking up their blood. The walls, floor, and ceiling around them were pockmarked with grenade shrapnel. Even at a glance, the Baron could see that the Mk 2 had exploded unevenly upon return—a known flaw in the grenade’s design—but not a single fragment had flown back towards Schuler or his allies. The unlikely coincidence suggested this was another Diviner special.
“Elegant wishing,” the Baron judged darkly.
“Thank you!” Schuler called from behind.
Further down the hall, pairs of mercenaries had fallen to each shot from Mr. Roach. His rounds, imbued with the strength to pierce, had punched fist-sized exit wounds out of their backs—severing spines, shattering ribs, and shredding lungs.
With a damaged shoe, the Zombie shoved one mangled body into a hole in the floorboards, letting it come to rest on the joists underneath. He saw the Baron coming, waved, and then jogged on ahead, glancing into the empty and ruined rooms.
“Keep going!” Osman called.
d’Holbach glanced back. Everyone else was lined up behind him, using him as an indirect hostage against any possible threat from the Zombie. Schuler was closest and calmest, peering through his lustrous copper frames at all the ruined gaps in the walls.
The Zombie gave another thumbs up and jogged on further, flicking his head from side to side, scanning for threats with sharp eyes. “If anyone sees my hat, grab it!”
The Baron didn’t search for the bowler, but he studied the damage from the Green Dragon Crescent Blade. Those last two slashes had cut across the story in two broad swathes, freeing vast sheets of the walls before knocking them down. Beyond the ubiquitous slabs of plaster and lath, time-yellowed wall studs gaped like old teeth, split water pipes gushed freely into dusty gaps, and smaller steel crossbars bent outwards, tracing the force of the attacks. The stairwell—distant as it was—was just visible, running alongside a vertical support beam.
The illusion of distinct rooms had vanished; this was all a single floor, separated by artificial barriers. Many of the indoor lights were broken, but thin sunshine streamed through the dusty gaps from distant second story windows, and enough lamps and fixtures had survived to illuminate the gloom. Countless offices now laid in ruins. Shattered books, destroyed hardwood desks, and folded paintings presented themselves as recognizable losses. So much else was returned to raw materials, debris jutting with splinters or settling with gushes of powder.
If that magic guandao was used on the streets of New York, it could inflict unimaginable property damage and take many, many lives. Running from its range would require more than simple sprinting. The Baron would need the element of surprise, somehow.
Up ahead, the Zombie followed the once serpentine turns of the temple hall in an obvious zig-zag motion, stopping at the damaged stairwell door. The Baron followed quickly, following the old hallway while skirting around the occasional CPUSA corpse. The angle of the lower slash dug down, opening the gaps in the walls wider and wider, but the damage stopped right before it touched the carpet on the landing beyond the split stairwell door.
The Zombie whistled appreciatively. “Your building is still whole!”
“Good control,” Sgt. Wade praised his General.
“Always, Sergeant,” Osman purred with pride.
The Baron guessed that the General had some ability to alter the range of the attack. There was no obvious damage to the concrete outer walls, and he’d only cut through a few main steel beams, which Schuler had instantly restored.
The Zombie kicked the remains of the stairwell door through the damaged jamb, knocking them into the still-whole railing. Idly, he nudged a shattered piece of door around with his foot, guiding it between two black iron railing posts. It slid between the gaps and over the edge, tumbling down the open air shaft in the middle of the stairwell before clapping lightly against the ground floor. “Should I go down?” he called, glancing back at everyone.
“Wait there!” Osman replied.
Underfoot, there were occasional bursts of gunfire. The Baron recalled Lt. Sadgrove’s appraisal of the situation. Some enforcers were fighting against Soviet mercs, and Enzu was among them. Right now, the Zombie wanted to descend and join the battle, but he wouldn’t have a choice, not while the Baron was so close to Schuler, the enforcers, or Osman himself.
As they approached, an intuition scratched at the back of the Baron’s mind. He’d heard a light clap of impact, not a hard thud. A full floor drop was survivable for any athletic person with training, but it was far easier if the surface was softened in any way, like soil or carpeting.
He stared at the Zombie, opening his eyes as wide as possible, a signal to communicate. The Zombie met his gaze, then flickered away, looking around like a bored cat tracing a particularly interesting mote of dust. Then he turned back and yelled, “Osman? You don’t need me to scout?” He cast another thumbs up towards them, meaningless positivity to everyone but the Baron himself. It was a signal that he was paying attention to d’Holbach now.
“Wait a moment!” Osman called. “I’m going to sight first!”
The Baron set his right hand in front of his stomach, flattened out like a barrier. Then using his left hand, he “jumped” a finger over the barrier and whipped the finger down, suggesting acceleration. Then he casually slipped his hands into his pockets. Hopefully, the pantomime communicated the idea clearly enough.
The Zombie gave another thumbs up. “Understood, Osman!” It was an imperfect plan, but the Zombie approved of the escape attempt. Good enough.
d’Holbach looked back over his shoulder briefly, actively disengaging from his destination for a few seconds. “What are we looking for?”
“Guerra and Cecil will try to cover both stairwells!” General Osman called back to him from the end of the line. “If they’re close, I don’t want your devil punching my enforcers to death!”
So Osman was willing to risk a brief approach to the Zombie, hoping to avoid any out-of-view violence against New York’s finest fighters. The goal must be to keep everyone in view of Schuler, since he arguably was the most influential occult threat in the building.
Lt. Sadgrove, Sgt. Wade, and Mr. Roach were shuffling around each other to get a good look past Meister Schuler. Some were watching the Baron. Others were watching the Zombie. All of them were cautious, inspecting their prisoners closely, but they probably wouldn’t expect d’Holbach to open some distance with gravity’s help.
The Baron resumed his walk, turning the final corner towards the Zombie. If he sprinted at the last moment, there wouldn’t be enough time for anyone to react, to aim a weapon or finish a command. He’d simply vault the railing, land below, and run.
The Zombie pushed away from the cast iron railing and stepped back through the damaged door jamb. “I don’t see anybody on the bottom floor,” he said, taking two steps towards the Baron. “What do you think—”
The Baron launched into a full sprint at the Zombie.
The Zombie darted left, barely clearing a collision with his friend, then bounced right to cover him against gunfire while charging Schuler directly.
Among New York’s enforcers, the fastest amongst them was surprisingly Lt. Sadgrove. “Through!” he shouted, audibly unholstering his Luger with a metal click and scraping leather.
On intuition alone, the Baron jumped early, diving horizontally onto the railing’s handbar. Crack—a gunshot, intended for a calf or thigh, passed through both Schuler and the Zombie, missing beneath the Baron, all in the instant before his belly folded over the bar and momentum carried him into a tumble. Feet went over his head, like he was a child rolling over the top of a fence. A flash of the stairwell blurred around him, and then he was falling.
Vertigo greeted him for three racing heartbeats, suggesting panicked flailing or locked limbs, but he was a man conditioned by old wars. Practice demanded readied legs and spread arms, enforcing a sense of balance. A breathless acceleration. Less than a second later, he landed on his feet, absorbing the impact by folding up, flexing against deceleration like he was squatting, until he struck the carpet with his hands and fell forward onto his knees, half-rolling to a stop. The carpeting prevented some bad bruises on his kneecaps.
“Baron!” General Osman roared, somewhere above. Two more gunshots.
The impact had strained every bit of d’Holbach, but he was too fit to stop. There was a wall in front of him, a door behind him. He twisted away, leaping up towards the exit.
Overhead, the metal railing shattered with an explosive bang, and the Zombie’s body sailed backwards over the gap—still gripping the Cat—and slammed into the back wall of the stairwell, bouncing off the concrete superstructure and ragdolling onto the mid-story landing.
The Baron didn’t have to guess. Schuler was defending his General and the enforcers. Nothing to do but run.
d’Holbach pulled open the exit in front of him to reveal a confused man in front of a hallway full of corpses. All at a glance—a short salt and pepper beard, a plaster cast on one arm, and the other raised high and holding a Saturday night special in full view. This was the best possible result for the worst possible moment.
“Baron?” Enzu Guerra asked with alarm. There were six CPUSA corpses here and a great deal of blood. Had he killed all six men with a shitty revolver?
“Enzu!” the Baron shouted. “Move!”
Enzu spluttered uncertainly. “What are you doing here?”
Before the Baron could answer, there was a strange click in the revolver, as if some tiny part had snapped. The enforcer’s eyes darted up, a moment of recognition.
Far behind Enzu, a uniformed figure slid out of a door and into the hall full of dead bodies, holding a 12-gauge break action shotgun in his hands.
The Baron’s eyes opened wide.
Enzu roared, “Dud!” Somehow, without seeing, he’d known what to wish for.
A pull on a shotgun’s trigger. A murderous click, striking a dead primer.
Enzu tossed the wish-ruined revolver, spun around on one foot, and in a single smooth motion, he proved why he was an elite enforcer for New York. He reached into his jacket, drew a Beretta from a shoulder holster, and hipfired the pistol like a trickshot at a carnival. One shot, loud but controlled, with utter confidence. By the time the revolver hit the floor, there was a tidy hole between the merc’s eyes, and a pink mist drifting through the air behind him.
Shot through the head, into the brainstem. Instant death. The merc collapsed.
“Shit!” Enzu cussed. “Got lucky!”
“Lucky?” the Baron asked, still hesitating.
“Gun broke,” Enzu huffed. “It’s a good warning!”
“Schuler!” the Zombie roared on the landing above them. “You ruined my shirt!”
“I have to go!” the Baron shouted, rushing past Enzu, trusting that the man wouldn’t shoot him in the back.
“Wait!” Enzu yelled. “Baron d’Holbach, stop!”
The Baron didn’t answer. He was already nearing the corner, just past the fresh CPUSA corpse. He’d give it a glance, and if there was a window in view, he’d sprint for it.
Instead of finding a clear hall or any path forward, he discovered a man in a grey business suit, kneeling with a Thompson sighted. “Surrender—”
The Baron’s heart leapt up through his throat, and his running momentum became another panicked dive to the carpet, clearing the hallway and scrambling into cover against the wall. “Enzu! Help!” he roared.
“Ey, what?” yelled the man in the hall. “En-zu, it’s me! I’m comin’ in!” His voice was slightly nasal, and he hit the “zu” with a sharp z and a long vowel.
“Cecil!” Enzu called. “Be careful! That’s the Baron!”
d’Holbach rolled over onto his ass, looking down the hall. Enzu was holding his Beretta towards the floor, keeping his fingers out of the trigger guard.
“The fuckin’ legend?” Cecil came out of the hall, facing towards the Baron and gripping his Thompson in his hands. He had short black hair and a young-looking face with a shallow chin, but his hairline was receding. “Fuck me, that’s the Salem guy, right? Isn’t he a prisoner?”
“Yeah?” Enzu replied, and it was definitely a question.
“I need a way out!” the Baron cried, pushing to his feet. “Schuler and the Zombie are fighting!” he shouted, hoping that an apocalyptic potential for property destruction would make his entire case for him.
Cecil glanced halfway back at Enzu, then focused back on d’Holbach again, lifting the Tommy’s barrel to track the Baron. “Should we arrest him? Or something?”
The Baron cringed. He’d have to argue his case. “You need to understand—”
His voice was drowned out by the voice of a stern father, wrathful and damning with every booming word. General Osman, amplified by wishes, could be heard through all the floors and walls, as if he were yelling into a bullhorn. “Enforcers! The Baron d’Holbach is on the ground floor! If you find him, secure him until Meister Schuler or myself can collect him!”
Cecil lifted his Thompson, aiming it dead at the Baron’s chest but keeping his finger out of the trigger guard. “Answers that. Surrender, Mr. Baron. General’s orders.”
“I can’t!” the Baron shouted. “I have to run! The world might depend on it!”
“Not much of a story.” Cecil wiggled the barrel expertly down towards the Baron’s thighs. “Just stand still for a second.” Without moving his head or his weapon, he raised his voice. “Enzu, you got your cuffs?”
Enzu was approaching quickly, head on a swivel in case more CPUSA members came running after the General’s universal declaration.
The Baron did his best to explain everything in one panicked speech. “The Russians are warring with themselves! One side hired me to force a stalemate! Stalin’s side hired these mercs to stop me! If I don’t escape now, Stalin wins, and then it spills out from there! It will end in nukes!”
Cecil shrugged, tapping a finger on the outside of the trigger guard. “It’s orders, Mr. Baron. Tell the General—”
“I already have!” the Baron roared. “The nobles don’t care! Ask Enzu!”
Cecil turned his head halfway, keeping the Baron in the corner of one eye and sighting Enzu in the corner of the other. “En-zu?” he asked.
The older enforcer winced, stopping behind Cecil. “It’s true. Every word. Keeping him is stupid. I just thought the old boys would let him go.”
There was a series of three wrecking-ball slams, as if someone was repeatedly ramming a car into a concrete wall. The enforcers glanced up, but the Baron ignored the sound; nothing was crashing down around him yet.
“Just stand down,” he begged. “Lie if you have to, but let me go!”
Cecil sighed, resighting his weapon. A ringed finger ran up and down the outside of the trigger guard. “I don’t know, man. My job is orders, not decisions.”
Enzu shrugged. “Nah, forget it. We’re paid by the body, not the prisoner. He’s not our problem if we didn’t see him. I say, let the Baron go.”
“Well—” Cecil began, only to be interrupted by a deep thud, followed by an acute shattering of wood, crunchy and splintering.
“The fuck?” Enzu asked.
Somewhere else in the building, a floor gave way, dropping glass and wooden wreckage down a story in a tremendous pour. No single note of that chaos was loud, but the sum of it drummed out of the walls like the rumble of a crashing wave, echoing in their chests.
The Baron regrettably recognized the sound. The Zombie had just fallen through the second story floor, dropping down the contents of a room and a tree’s worth of ruined joists.
“Fuck you, Schuler!” roared the Zombie, barely audible through the walls.
With dreadful anxiety, the Baron understood what he’d already heard. Like Kaiser Abbas before him, the Diviner had thrown the Zombie through multiple walls—those three rapid slams—and then he’d smote him down to the ground floor. It wasn’t hard; the Zombie was an object. He couldn’t be hurt, but he could be thrown around to keep him away from his enemies.
Somewhere in the building, Schuler had finally earned the space to operate independently of the Zombie’s threats. The moment the Baron did anything at all to draw attention, Schuler would know where to find him.
“Just point me toward a window!” he pleaded, a strained whisper-shout. “For the world!”
Cecil scowled. “Nah, fuck that, Mr. Baron. I know Salem. We got to cuff you to control the Zombie, or he’ll kill everyone here.”
“No, he won’t! I command him!”
“Yeah, sure you do. Just like Salem.” Cecil waved behind himself with a hand. “Cuffs?”
Enzu scowled, holstered his pistol, and set his shoulders back. The Baron saw a transformation in the old enforcer, a practiced relaxation dropped like a robe to reveal the underlying instincts. Enzu had shot seven men with a kind of gormless confidence, but now he displayed the long-practiced anger of a bloodthirstier man. He gritted his jaw. “Cecil? Look at me, boy,” he commanded.
Cecil waved Enzu off. “Cuffs first, man.”
Enzu tightened his free hand into a fist, flexing it a couple of times. “He ain’t running. That’s why he’s begging. Now, look at me.”
“Jesus, En-zu, fine.” Cecil didn’t change his grip on the Thompson, but he turned his head sideways to spot the elder enforcer.
“Jammed,” wished Enzu Guerra, and he threw a punch into Cecil’s temple with all of his weight behind it, following through. Cecil’s head whipped about half a foot, jaw slacked by momentum. Yet somehow, in that instant, Cecil got his finger into the trigger guard before he blacked out. Click.
“Fuck!” the Baron cursed at the sound, even as Cecil toppled over sideways onto the carpet, completely unconscious for a full second or two. “Holy shit, Enzu!”
“He ain’t dead,” Enzu declared.
Immediately, Cecil regained consciousness, groaning loudly. A hand reached out, grabbed the jammed Thompson, and cradled it to his chest like a teddy bear as he struggled to recover. “What the fuck, man!” he yelled, blinking rapidly.
Enzu took one step forward, shouting, “Stay down! Don’t squeal!”
Cecil flipped him the bird. “Fuck you, man!”
“You crossing me?”
“No, but—”
“I was with Murder Inc!”
Cecil raised a hand in surrender. “I ain’t! I ain’t crossin’! You just… you fuckin’ punched me!”
“You‘re damn right, you aren’t crossing me!” Enzu snapped his fingers, then waved the Baron off like someone dismissing an errand boy. “End of the hall, to the left. Office is open. Take the window. And if Schuler finds you, tell him I sent you. Maybe he’ll fuck off for a friend.”
The Baron looked down at Cecil, rubbing the side of his head. “What about him?”
Enzu shrugged. “You spared me, so I’ll spare him. So shines a good deed, yeah?”
“Yeah. In a weary world.”
“Good,” Enzu said. “Cecil won’t say shit, so run, gods damnit.” He pointed towards the empty side hall, with all its closed doors and unknown threats, all the terrors of a potential battlefield. “Before ol’ Schuler gets here! Run!”
The Baron nodded, pivoted around the corner, and sprinted down the empty hall. CPUSA was still out there, in the building and beyond. Schuler would surely find him, and the Zombie might not catch up in time. Yet the Baron must try. He must run.
Enzu agreed, shouting with all of his heart, “Run like the world is coming to an end!”
Author’s Note:
I love this arc!
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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The Baron was exactly the kind of man who looked a gift horse in the mouth, inspected the teeth, and complained about rotten molars. As he followed Schuler out of the Caretaker’s room and into a narrow hall, he sought to understand their prompt evacuation. “Why would you take us to Tweed? Why not keep us locked up until Enzu comes, like I asked?”
Schuler paused, fixing them with a glare while adjusting his bifocals with a wrinkle of his nose. “Enzu will be fighting! As will you!”
“The Baron won’t,” the Zombie muttered, stopping in the Baron’s shadow.
d’Holbach raised a hand for momentary silence. “Schuler, I need to understand. You could keep us safe in that room with the Cat. Why pull us out?”
“Because there’s no purpose there!” Schuler said hurriedly. “Don’t you understand?” He swept around and started walking again. “Follow me!”
The Baron jolted into motion, trailing close behind him, and the Zombie continued to track at their heels. “I don’t understand,” d’Holbach admitted.
“When the gods demand action, I live with purpose!” Schuler reached a stairwell door at the end of the hall, throwing it open with a defiant swing of his arm.
“What do you mean?” the Baron asked, catching the door after it bounced off a wall stop.
The Diviner was stomping down the stairwell, but he answered the question loudly, sending his voice echoing up and down three stories. “Microtasks, Baron! Crumbs!”
The Baron rushed down after him, taking the steps two at a time with a hand on the railing at all times. “What about them?”
The Zombie shut the door to the third story and followed quickly.
Schuler reached the second story landing and wrenched open a wooden door, exiting directly into the heart of Tammany Hall. “The gods themselves spread crumbs! Hansel follows!” He thudded his own chest with the palm of his free hand. “But there are no crumbs here, only out there!” He gestured wildly at the wall and the world beyond. “So I hear the message! I must go out, and you must be handled. If you will accept Tweed, then fine! To him!” He waved through the open door, to the temple halls beyond. “Now, go!”
“I don’t accept anything,” the Baron said as he passed by Schuler, out of the stairwell and into a crimson-carpeted passageway. “I just wanted to talk to him.”
Specifically, d’Holbach wanted to use Tweed’s personal guards as a breakout force, at least until an opportunity to escape presented itself.
“He knows what you want!” Schuler shouted, holding the door only long enough for the Zombie to rush in after them. The Diviner clapped this last door shut, then oriented himself towards the inevitable. “Ahead. Through the main hall, and into the triumvirate’s court.”
The Baron led them onward at Schuler’s direction, skirting past lounges and offices, rushing towards the center of the building. Schuler followed in jagged bursts, and the Zombie brought up the rear, grinning with anticipation. Violence was at hand.
They were about three turns away from their destination when a porcine old man leaned out of an office up ahead, spotting the Baron at the lead. A frown screwed up his round face, bending a waxed mustache, and he tugged on his own lapels with an audible harrumph. His suit jacket—double-breasted, wool, fit more for the winter than this spring condition—was of fine quality, but decades out of date, like a living Mr. Pennybags. “Schuler?” he called, finally spying the only familiar face in this small crowd. “Are these the prisoners—”
“Shut up! Shut up!” the Diviner yelled at him. “My head hurts,” he added, a growling afterthought. “I need directions, crumbs, crumbs, crumbs…”
The old man half-shut the door in front of himself like a shield. His eyes sought the Baron, silently begging for some understanding of events, but d’Holbach only spared the stranger a nod. There was no time for social niceties.
Every second might cut the difference in the coming battle, and the Baron was looking for an opportunity to leave. If he was going to start his exit alongside Tweed, then they needed to rendezvous immediately.
“Apologies, sir!” the Zombie called at the rear, giving the porcine man a mock-salute “We’re hurrying to the Boss!”
“Why?” Mr. Pennybags asked, a single word of demand that also contained the bulk of all his fears.
The Zombie pivoted on one foot to walk backwards, answering as he left, “Men are attacking the temple! You should meet up with the rest, organize!”
“But sacred ground?” Mr. Pennybags objected, and those three words were an entire argument about culture, about the sanctity of temples against violence, and about the risk of punitive tasks against transgressors.
Good men, those with lives and responsibilities, didn’t fight inside temples. These were neutral territories until they weren’t, until someone was ready to die while desecrating holy ground. In the worst case, such a profaned place could become mundane land, and anyone in debt would simply awaken in a different sanctuary.
“They’ll attack if they can win!” the Zombie yelled cheerily, dismissing every bit of religious tradition with an acknowledgment of simple, awful power. If the enemy had enough bodies, they’d storm any shut door, even in these secluded places.
Rifles popped outside the building like firecrackers. Someone laid into a car horn for several seconds. There was more gunfire in another direction, and an eruption of voices ahead of them. The main hall lurked just out of view, filled with a leaderless tumult, likely a crowd of lesser nobles or Tammany Hall cultists. The Baron slowed, reconsidering.
“Follow or fall!” Schuler yelled, skirting past the Baron and into the main hall. After a moment’s heartbeat, where his eyes met the Zombie’s unflinching gaze, a silent agreement was struck. If a Diviner shouted such things, it truly was safest to follow his “crumbs” a little further, those little tasks of the gods that somehow guided his wizardly steps through the world.
The Zombie fell into step with the Baron, and together, they emerged into the panic of a dozen lesser nobles. These were powerful people, unused to fear. Every moment of anxiety released another exclamation of frustration, another sharp word.
Who would dare attack New York? How could they bring a force this close to the heart of Lower Manhattan? Were the guards dead? Had their posts been wiped out silently? There were no windows in the temple. Nobody could even glance outside to see the fighting.
Some younger men were clustered at the secretary’s desk, shouting into a pair of telephones at the internal operators. The switchboard women wouldn’t know the answers to their half-formed demands. They needed intelligence; they needed leadership. They had neither, though a couple of armed enforcers were stalking the crowd, urging calm against chaos.
“Sound and fury,” the Baron said to his companion.
“All idiots,” the Zombie replied.
Men stepped aside or Schuler shoved them, creating a momentary passage through the lesser nobles. The Baron and Zombie strode forward, occupying that space before it could close. An accountant had the presence of mind to open the final door ahead of them.
Out of the court came the next blows of a shouting match.
Boss Tweed struck with a roar: “Who opened the door!”
“Sir!” the accountant quailed, “The Diviner—”
“Here!” Schuler rushed in, folding and unfolding his hands in nervous twitches. The Baron and Zombie trailed after him, and the door slammed shut behind them. One crowd vanished, but this space was no quieter, if only because these men, still seated on their thrones, were used to talking with the unquestioned authority of armies.
“Our remaining security forces are entirely secular,” General Osman spoke forcefully, not bothering to question why the Baron had returned to their chambers. “Only a handful are former military. We coddled the fucking nobles and spread ourselves too thin.”
“I wasn’t going to let Manhattan slide into anarchy—” Tweed said.
“We can’t call the real soldiers back in,” General Osman continued. “Nearly all occult warriors, the trained, the armed, they’re fighting to keep our streets.”
“Many are dead now,” Gagliano suggested.
The General sneered. “You don’t know that.”
Gagliano shrugged. “We sent them out to clear Manhattan. They failed, and their radios are silent. How’s that possible, unless they’re gone?”
Osman bark-laughed once, a sharp sound of pure disdain. “We’re dealing with an occult foe, you old bookie! They only need one captured radio and a few years of prestige to preemptively silence us—station by station.” He punctuated those last words by jamming an index finger into his own palm, as if pressing the button on a terrible weapon.
“How?” Gagliano asked. “We hid most of the guard posts.”
“If it’s CPUSA, they look like civil workers,” the Baron said, deciding to insert himself on Osman’s side before this conversation spiralled back around to the same argument and wasted precious time. “Police, firemen, you name it. They’re all embedded civvies.”
“Meister Schuler, why have you brought him here?” Tweed asked sharply.
“He asked to come,” Schuler said.
“I would’ve called for him anyways,” Osman added.
The Baron spread his hands to the triumvirate. “I’m just telling you, it’s almost certainly them, same as it was in Red Hook—the Soviet fifth column.”
General Osman pointed a finger at the Baron. “He’s right, you know. We’ve run into scouts, and they’re all looking for him. This is about the Cat.”
“Which is why we have to leave,” the Baron suggested.
Boss Tweed laughed derisively, weaving his ring-encrusted fingers together across his portly belly. “I’m not leaving this building. We’re defending it!”
“Bullshit!” General Osman yelled. “I’m your gods-damn Banker! I’m heading to the nearest safe house—with the Baron! With the Cat!”
“What about us?” Gagliano murmured.
The General scoffed. “If they desecrate the temple, then you two dodge with the nobles. If they don’t, then you come with us! Either way, these are my forces, under my command!”
The Baron felt a faint satisfaction, recognizing Osman’s strategy. Dodging while inside an active temple risked returning you to the same building. However, if the enemy spilled blood on holy ground, then two things would happen. A great task would fall on the heads of the desecrators, guaranteeing their rapid demise, and the local sanctuaries would stop working. After that, all dodges would send debtors to other temples, making it easy to escape the Hall.
Unfortunately, the Baron had no prestige, and even if he’d carried some, dodging was dangerous at best. Every temple in the city was full of armed men with standing orders to arrest him, and he’d be utterly separated from the Zombie again. He needed to escape on foot.
“Are you counting Schuler?” the High Oracle asked Osman.
“Of course I am! And the Zombie, unless he wants to see his precious Baron die!” General Osman ran a hand down his tremendous white beard, a light tug of frustration on his own chin. “You don’t want that, do you, you fuckin’ devil? You want to save your kraut master?”
The Zombie nodded once, no jokes or snipes, even while Osman spat decades-old racism. “We have to leave,” he insisted calmly, repeating the Baron’s words.
General Osman grunted with satisfaction. “There you have it.” He rose to his feet with the ease of a much younger man. “Even the bloodthirsty Chinaman sees the wisdom in it. We’re leaving. With the Devil’s help.”
“Is that so?” Gagliano asked the Zombie.
The Baron watched a flicker of emotion pass over his friend’s face, but the severity of this situation forced the obvious conclusion. “It is so,” the Zombie agreed
Gagliano waved off Osman’s triumphant grin. “Fine, have it your way, General.”
Osman wasn’t a tall man, but he was broad and muscular. He faced Tweed. “You too, Boss. Unless they desecrate the temple, we have to move on foot. You have to come.”
The large man shifted in his plush throne. “Have to?” he asked, staring over his little beard at his General. “If I go outside and people recognize me, the cost of my life skyrockets. You know this. I swore, twenty-five years ago, to stand my ground—”
“You swore it when we could surround this place with guns!” General Osman shouted. “Oracle, Leader, and Banker!” He thumped himself on the chest, marking himself as the primary pool of prestige for the New York cult. “We can’t afford to lose anyone over a gods-forsaken principle. As your general, I order you both to stand up!”
Gagliano shoved his chair back a half-inch and stood. “I already agreed.”
Tweed shifted his bulk, then used both arms to lift himself out of his chair and onto his feet. “Fine. You old bastard. Fine.”
“Schuler!” Osman pointed at the wobbling madman. “Hit the boy outside with an order. Get on the horn, signal the posts. HQ will be occupied by the enemy. I want anyone within a mile to move to the safe house on 7th street. Everyone else, return to the nearest temple. The enemy should respect temple boundaries except for this Hall. Understood?”
Schuler focused in with a ripple of facial muscles like a tremendous twitch. “Yes, General!” he said with a sharp salute. “Any orders for the other nobles in the building?”
“Tell them to stand by. If the enemy desecrates the temple, all non-combatants will leave by dodging. Otherwise, we’ll secure the main hall and arrange for their escape.”
“Yes, General!” Schuler ducked through the chamber doors and started repeating these messages to a mousy young accountant, huddling just outside the triumvirate’s chambers.
“Lower Manhattan will be shutting down,” General Osman told the rest. “This also means that the fucking spooks are about to hammer us like a jutting nail.”
“Langley will?” Tweed asked.
“Of course!” Osman answered. “I know their playbook. They’ll look to occupy the Hall with the National Guard, so we need to move to a defensible position until—”
Gunshots exploded into raucous chatter underfoot. Everyone straightened, instinctively stretching away from the floor. Then the gunfire stopped.
“Tommies going off in the lobby,” Osman said, “now silenced. It’s war.” He turned towards the apartment door behind his throne. It bore no visible handle, only a brass bump where one ought to be. “I wish to open it,” he said grimly, and with a series of metallic clicks and the chunk of a jumping latch, the door swung open.
“Where are you going?” Gagliano asked him.
Osman laughed, striding through a half-shadowed hall into the poorly lit depths of his apartment. “To arm myself, Oracle!”
From this angle, the Baron could see a thickly-carpeted anteroom with walnut furnishings—a small table, a hat rack, coat hooks—opening onto a private sitting room, overburdened with leather-clad furniture and ringed in by towering bookshelves. Snippets of crimson wallpaper peeked over the arrangement like a barely restrained glare.
For an instant, the General wasn’t in view, but from one side, there arose a clatter of wood against wood, like someone drawing lumber from a pile. Then a black-green crescent thrust into the antechamber, shimmering like a peacock feather, followed quickly by a long black haft clenched in Osman’s tremendous hands.
The Zombie spoke faster than anyone else, and his grin audibly shaped every word of appreciation. “Is that a fucking magic guandao?”
The General strode out of his apartment into the triumvirate’s chambers, raising the guandao towards the ceiling of the court, and the door swung shut behind him, automatically locking through some similarly archaic magic. All true artifacts were at least five centuries old—the door’s mechanism was salvaged from a 13th century French fortress, for example—but the guandao was likely far older, and it bore all the fantastic decorations of its era and place, unspoiled by time or combat.
Osman grinned with pride. “This is the Green Dragon Crescent Blade, as written in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the greatest of all Chinese novels! The weapon is a masterwork, a tenth century artifact from a Song artificer, made in the folkloric image of Guan Yu’s legendary blade. It was forged nearly four centuries before any oral tradition became a written word! I’d wager the legend itself begins in this artifact, this weapon of great and terrible war!”
From the cadence of his words, anyone could hear that General Osman was reciting a long-practiced speech. He twirled the weapon’s pitch-black haft, revealing the texture and shimmer of polished bituminous coal. The joint between its pole and blade was gold-plated and decoratively shaped like the mouth and forelimbs of the namesake dragon. The counterweight was similarly plated and styled to represent the tail and hindlimbs of the beast.
The crescent blade itself erupted from the dragon’s mouth like a gout of black flame. One edge was as sharply defined as the curve of the moon; the other was spiked like the licking tongues of a bonfire. But it wasn’t truly steel, nor even a chemically colored metal. The blade was a product of wishes through and through, shimmering like a bird’s feather or a beetle’s shell, void black at some angles and rippling vividly green at others.
“It’s a weapon from fiction?” the Zombie asked cheekily.
“Ha! It’s a threat, a display of power. If someone mistook it for a legend, all the better.” The General gently tilted the blade, admiring its shifting colors overhead. “It’s one of the few magic weapons on the planet that rivals or surpasses military-grade hardware. And you?” Osman lowered the peacock-green blade till it vaguely pointed at the Zombie himself. “You will scout for us. Walk ahead, call out enemy positions, and I will cut them down where they hide. If you do that, your precious Baron will survive.”
“I love being threatened with a good time,” the Zombie replied.
“Can the Cat survive it?” Gagliano asked, looking towards the Zombie’s left hand.
“That artifact? Absolutely,” Osman said. “It’s made to survive anything lethal to man. Hell, it’s been struck with an Apple of Perun. On record no less! They found it in a pile of burning ashes, unblemished. Cool to the touch.” He shook the guandao. “This wouldn’t even budge the damn thing. The only object that’s tougher is the Zombie himself.”
“Fascinating,” Gagliano muttered.
“Schuler,” Osman commanded, “I’ll need you to monitor the building. If I hit a support strut, fix it. I don’t want the third story to fall on our heads.”
“Yes, General,” Schuler said.
“And keep me apprised of the temple’s status.”
“Desecrated,” Gagliano said softly.
Everyone in the room paused. It was such a perfectly timed and terrifyingly specific result. There’d been no sounds of gunfire, which meant someone had just died in silence.
“Speak again?” Boss Tweed asked.
“Seconds ago,” Gagliano replied, “the gods placed a large task on the heads of five men, damned for profaning holy ground. The payout is decades, more than enough to justify fighting over every last inch of this building.” He glanced at Osman. “Think our enforcers can clear out CPUSA before the National Guard moves in? We’d need them all.”
“Of course! To the man!” Osman said, raising the guandao like a flag.
“To the man,” Tweed agreed quickly. “And don’t let the Baron distract us from this task.”
The Baron felt a spike of frustration. “What distraction? What are you expecting from me?”
Osman gestured to the other members of the triumvirate. “Gentlemen, hand me your pools and dodge to Greenwich. I’ll retrieve you once Manhattan is cleared.”
High Oracle Gagliano promptly shook hands with Osman, saying quietly, “All but a half a day.” He took a deep, sorrowful breath, then blew it out like a sigh.
Osman moved onto the next figure. “Tweed,” he said, offering to shake the Boss’s hand.
Tweed waved him aside with an irritated grunt. “Don’t bother. I wish for six years, three months, nine days, and twelve hours of renewed youth and vigor.” Instantly, he vanished into debt, leaving only the pop of a collapsing vacuum. Outside the room, the collective volume of the lesser nobles audibly rose from a murmur to a furor.
High Oracle Gagliano was hesitating before he dodged, staring at the Baron.
General Osman looked over at the Oracle. “Why are you still here?”
Gagliano pointed at the Baron. “Schuler, does he have any prestige?”
The Diviner blinked, reeling from the question, but answered with clipped, quick words: “No. He didn’t dodge me this morning. He’s empty.”
“You don’t know that,” the Baron said quickly, even though it was true. On reflection, he really should’ve asked Phyllis to hand him another half day. It wouldn’t have made a strategic difference, but it might’ve made a tactical one, and it would’ve undermined New York’s strategy.
“I trust his judgement,” Gagliano muttered.
“Get to safety, Oracle,” Osman ordered.
Gagliano nodded, wrinkling his smashed nose. “Penny in my left pocket.” Another clap of collapsing air, and the High Oracle was gone, leaving only four men in the room.
Osman swiveled to face toward the main hall, planting the counterweight of the guandao against the floor. He posed, ready to command his nobility. “Schuler, open the door!”
Schuler spun about and threw open the court door, slamming the knob into the wall outside. For a second, the thud of the impact silenced all conversations. A dozen faces snapped to Osman, wordlessly waiting to receive the guidance of their General.
“Everyone,” General Osman bellowed, “spread the word! This is no longer holy ground! Non-combatants, transfer all excess prestige to the nearest enforcers, then dodge to another temple! Fighters, be ready to occupy territory after Schuler and I sweep through!”
Instantly, the crowd broke out into a series of shouts, seeking both to accept and give away prestige. Power was rapidly flowing from lesser nobles to a handful of occult guards, and as they finished their transfers, the non-combatants vanished. The air cracked repeatedly, a series of small imploding vacuums, summing up to the thunder of a rout.
The Baron stepped closer to the Zombie. “Be ready,” he whispered, inaudible beneath the tumult of magical teleportation. “I’ll find our moment.”
The Zombie nodded, even as he stared out at the chaos of evacuation with a grin.
A middle-aged man in a guard uniform came running up the hall to Osman, a Tommy swinging at his hip. “Sir, we’ve lost control of the main lobby!”
“Seargent Wade!” Osman called, waving him close. “Report?”
Sgt. Wade ignored the vanishing nobility, delivering prompt intel: “We observed and approached an armed party in Union Square Park. On contact, they opened fire, killing one and injuring two, then fell back to the trees. Lt. Decoin sallied out with the majority of our forces to surround and root them out. Once they were engaged, a strike force deployed from cars on 17th and rushed us through the north entrance.”
“One feint, one real attack,” the Baron whispered to the Zombie.
The Zombie chuckled, smoothing down the front of his blue dress shirt like a preening bird. The battlefield was his domain, but strategy was the Baron’s, and d’Holbach had correctly predicted another move from their opponents.
“Where’s Decoin now?” General Osman asked the sergeant.
“Pushing up 17th street, fighting to get back in.”
“The attackers, all occult?” the General probed.
“Well-funded, General. They jammed the guns, overpowered the secular crew. They’re sweeping the first floor now, pushing into the second.”
“Did any secular officials retreat to their offices?”
“Yes, General, but the attacking force is wishing locks open.”
“Why?”
“They’re moving everyone into the speaking hall.”
“Any cover story?”
“Someone got a call up to an administrator before the attackers reached the switchboard. They’re claiming they’re here to take revenge on the Lucchese family. Everyone hears that they’re aiming for Gagliano. They know he isn’t dead.”
“Mm. He’s not their primary target,” Osman judged, “but they’re pulling a cover story and minimizing secular casualties. Our plan should be the same. We’ll hide the occult dead and keep the official body count down.”
“What about our escape, Osman?” the Baron asked.
Osman cast him a plain glance, no longer scowling. “We take the north stairwell to the ground floor, then break through the wall onto 17th street. From there, we circle east around the block and hit alleys heading south. It’s about ten minutes on foot to the safe house on 7th. I trust you’ll cooperate and make this easy for us? For Schuler?”
“Of course, General,” the Baron answered, even as he mentally scoured the plan for obvious holes. His best bet would be to find a breakaway point on the ground floor, where the Zombie could run interference against Schuler and Osman at the same time.
If he could get out of the building, New York would be tied up with suppressing the fifth column, and they wouldn’t be able to give chase. The Zombie would easily catch up, and then they’d look for a place to rendezvous with Phyllis, starting back at the Artemisian safe house on Canal street. If they could find her, they’d take any help they could get. And if they couldn’t? Then they’d simply make their way to Denisov on their own.
A question passed through the Baron’s mind. Where was Phyllis right now? Did she really instigate this conflict? Or was the CPUSA acting on their own?
Unless the mercenaries delivered the Cat to Malik today, all former party members were going to be exposed. No matter what, this battle would be CPUSA’s final hurrah.
The last of the nobles vanished, leaving behind only two armed enforcers. One of them was an old man with a souvenir Luger from the war. He was counting loose bullets and dropping them in an old army coat pocket. The other was a young man in a suit with a greasy looking M1 Garand, recently pulled out of storage and scraped free of waxy, half-dry cosmoline. His pockets bulged with clips full of rifle rounds, both pants and jacket alike.
“Lieutenant Sadgrove! Mr. Roach!” Osman said, smiling with familiarity. “How is your prestige?”
“Fresh years, General,” the old man said in a soft British accent. He must’ve been Lt. Sadgrove; two off-white cloth pips rested on a dark green shoulder mark, indicating his rank in WW1.
“That’s a full count on fleeing nobles,” the young man added curtly. “We can cut loose, General.” He must’ve been Mr. Roach.
“Any other enforcers still in the building?” Osman asked them.
Lt. Sadgrove blinked with calm eyes. “Top floor, Thurston and Oaks are guarding the stairwells. Ground floor, Guerra and Cecil are roaming. We’re making hell, General.”
The Baron noted Guerra’s name—that’d be Enzu, already fighting.
“Good. Sadgrove, cover the Baron. Make sure he’s safe.”
“Yes, General,” Sadgrove muttered.
“Schuler, Mr. Roach, take spotter positions. Wade, you’ll stay by me. I’ll manage artillery while the Zombie scouts.”
“Can do, General,” Mr. Roach said.
“Yes, General,” Sgt. Wade added with a salute.
Everyone arranged themselves as ordered—the Zombie at point with General Osman right behind him—and they marched forward through the open court door and into the main hall. The Baron followed slowly, feeling the presence of Lt. Sadgrove at his back.
The hall leading out through the main temple door was already cleared. The dull glow of chandeliers cast deep shadows behind the furniture and into the doors of unlit lounges. All doors to offshoot halls were now shut, but the Zombie was approaching the double-doors to the main thoroughfare, the winding hallway that’d take them out of this place.
“Clear the line, Baron,” Lt. Sadgrove suggested. The Baron complied immediately, moving towards the left wall and some semblance of indoor cover.
Osman stopped one step to the left of the doors, facing the wall. He gestured, and the guard with the Tommy moved up to the right, crouching beside the doorjamb. A few yards back, Mr. Roach lay prone near a seating bench that he could roll under, sighting his rifle.
Meister Schuler wore the same combat clothes from this morning, but he quickly pulled on a pair of black leather gloves, flexing them with soft creaks. Then reached up with his middle finger and shoved his lustrous copper bifocals half an inch up the bridge of his nose.
Osman snapped his fingers at the Zombie and pointed at the door, then shifted his pose, lifting that massive guandao into a head-down chopping stance. It was time to scout the enemy.
The Zombie grinned, nodded, and opened the doors to an empty hall.
The invincible man listened to the squeal of poorly oiled hinges, dragged down by solid wood panels. His gaze flickered along the empty hall, sighting all the lounges and offices that were now abandoned. Doors had been left open, providing a plethora of hiding spots. He’d hoped for roving squads, masses of fifth column fighters. Instead, he found a tangle of possible enemy positions, which needed flushing out before his vulnerable friend could escape.
The temple’s blessing was broken, so a murder had already happened somewhere on the second floor. At least one enemy was in here, waiting in ambush near a civilian corpse.
So he did his best to look mortal. He skulked and skirted close to the right wall, shuffling his shoes a little too loudly on the carpeted floors. He glanced into open rooms, peeking into corners and beneath desks. Men might lurk in the shadows cut by yellowing incandescent bulbs. Across various lounges and parlors, a few of the ubiquitous televisions remained lit but muted, displaying black-and-white images of daytime talk shows and soap operas, illuminating the odd angles of their rooms with the soft snowy glow of phosphorescence. The twin smells of cigarettes and liquor drifted at the edges of awareness like a kiss of fog.
Up until a minute ago, rich nerves had been dulled with drugs. Now, those wealthy and weak men had been cast across the city, assured that their dodges wouldn’t return them to the heart of danger.
The Zombie imagined the feelings of those elites, and he faked a fearful breath, tasting the air. He could almost detect the dripping sweat of human adrenaline. It wasn’t a real sensation, merely instinct impressed upon the empty darkness, but somehow, he knew someone was looking at him, waiting for a moment of inattention. Then a gun would be pointed, a trigger pulled. He shuddered as he stepped further along the hall, seemingly alone.
A creak of a human joint, a bent limb turning through a frozen position. The click of some metal part moving softly in a turned mechanism; not an action of any kind, but a new settling to the Zombie’s left. He twitched, looking sharply towards the sound.
Around the edge of one of the open lounge doors, a CPUSA merc with a Thompson SMG was standing with one shoulder leaning against the jamb, sighting the barrel at the Zombie. His well-worn uniform, the cropped haircut, the wrinkle of his clean-shaven jowls—another WW2 vet had become a labourer and Communist, only to be coerced into becoming part of the Soviet fifth column. A cold expression locked onto his face; he’d already settled his heart, accepting both his own death and the murder of other men. Nevertheless, he hesitated. Pity for the weak? For the fearful? His army had killed children just yesterday. He should fear vengeance.
The merc lifted a finger to his lips, an order for silence.
The Zombie opened his eyes wide, raising both hands, and he shouted, “Don’t shoot!”
The CPUSA merc looked similarly alarmed at the shout. “On the floor!” he whisper-yelled, a voice of heavily restrained frustration, pointing with his barrel in lieu of a free hand.
“I didn’t see you behind the door!” the Zombie cried in faux-panic.
Then Mr. Roach, far back in the main hall, quietly declared, “Left.”
The Baron watched General Osman carefully, attempting to understand the function of the artifact-weapon in his broad hands. Did the magic guandao have an activation ritual? A word or phrase? A secondary artifact to signal ownership?
Osman took two deft steps with the verve of a young man—one back, one left—lining himself up with the offices and lounges that branched off to the left of the main hallway. Then he planted the counterweight of the Green Dragon Crescent Blade onto the carpeted floor behind himself, and he struck a martial pose. This was in fact a ritual, maybe even a critical one. His left hand balled into a fist at his beltline, and then he sharply spread his palm flat and launched his arm outward under tension, raising it smoothly up through an arc over his head, before bringing it back down like the edge of a blade to stop in front of his chest.
In all of that preparatory motion, there was neither doubt nor awkwardness. The General exuded confidence and strength. The weapon might very well have only responded to the hands of a martial master, but even if Osman’s wealth had purchased the privilege of holding it, the man had clearly sweated at practice and earned the right to wield it.
“Hah!” the General barked, sweeping out with his right foot to hook the polearm just above the counterweight. He kicked the pole up towards his dividing palm, rotating the guandao around its center of gravity just beneath the dragon’s head, and with a clap of wood, he caught the haft, gripping it in both hands for an overhead swing. The rest came in one motion, a step backwards and a swift chop downwards—right in front of the wall—cutting a strange band of violet light into the air beyond the blade’s glimmering green edge.
Meister Schuler clapped his hands over his ears.
The Baron failed to mimic him in time.
From the Zombie’s perspective, there was a sudden violet shine emanating from the air around the mercenary, as if someone had tracked a crystal prism into a thin stream of sunlight, refracting the bluest edge of the rainbow across a layer of flowing dust.
The merc saw it too; the rainbow’s arc slashed a diagonal through his body for a quarter second, the duration of a single human thought, preconscious and without words.
The Zombie’s instincts interpreted the sign. This magic traced the arc of severing, but left no time to react. Cruel. Muscles twitched to start a smile—
Violet instantly flickered through blue, cyan, brightening explosively down the rainbow until its green flash overwhelmed both vision and logic, becoming so bright it was sound, folding this colorful arc of the world up into itself and sweeping it away on a thunderous slash. A blade-thin layer of wall, firearm, mercernary—his ribs, blood, guts, living flesh—all exploded into the shape of the rainbow itself, spread on the green as a shrapnel blast of powdered plaster, shattered lath, insensate limbs, and lazily tumbling halves of a severed torso. The shockwave of the rainbow’s passage smashed the Zombie’s stolen bowler off his head like he was staring at a stick of blasting dynamite. Green then burst like confetti, dissolving rapidly through yellow, orange, before easing into a red haze that was half misted blood and half a rainbow’s ending.
“Wow!” the Zombie cried with delight, inaudible over the clatter and splash of tumbling debris. Part of the nearby wall was cracking free, unsupported.
The confetti of green resolved itself, falling out of the fading red haze into a brief rain of jade flakes, flitting down lazily through the air like the shed scales of a passing green dragon. “Nice touch!” the Zombie added, giving praise to a thousand year dead Song artificer for understanding the art of terror. The Green Dragon Crescent Blade didn’t only cut with spectacle and inform its victims of their demise. Jade confetti signed every slash like a signature.
The Zombie looked down at the dead man’s face. Not even surprised, only confused. The overpressure of the blast-slash had knocked the merc clean off this mortal coil. If he’d wished for the afterlife, then he’d have a hell of a story to tell in the lands of the dead.
“Target?” called Mr. Roach from afar.
“Dead!” the Zombie declared, turning away from the body to look for his hat. “Absolutely fucking killed!” he roared, finding the half-crumpled bowler across the hall.
The Baron clapped his hands to his ears, a meaningless gesture at this point. The Green Dragon Crescent Blade wasn’t as loud as a bomb, nor even as loud as a cannon, but it was somewhere on the order of lightning strike just outside your bedroom window. It was bright, alarming, and then thunderous rumbles were echoing through his chest and shuddering across the building, shaking windowpanes in their frames.
“Bedlam,” Lt. Sadgrove whispered behind the Baron.
Before the debris cleared, Schuler cried, “Support!”
General Osman planted the pole of the guandao on the floor. “I hit something?” he called to the Diviner. “I thought I was careful.”
Schuler adjusted his bifocals with a twitch of his nose. Copper frames glimmered beneath the light of ancient bulbs. “Main steel beam, General. It holds now.”
“Good!” Osman declared. “Good! One down, one dead, and every last one of those Commies to go!” He waved for everyone to rise. “Prepare to move! Zombie, lead on!”
Lt. Sadgrove broke away from the wall first, following orders.
The Baron unhunched his shoulders, standing to his full height and following the lieutenant. With this kind of firepower in play, the standards of secrecy were already loosening. New York was firing off powerful magic weapons in the middle of Manhattan, and that boded poorly for any conflicts coming this afternoon. A taboo broken only once might be forgiven, still enforced; a taboo broken a hundred times was no taboo at all.
Many, many men were going to die today. The Baron would have to make damn sure that he wasn’t one of them. He had to find a way out of this madness.
Author’s Note:
For fun, let’s talk about magical, historical inaccuracy!
There’s always some when it comes to an urban fantasy novel set in the historical past, but this arc is where we begin to deliberately diverge in clear, undeniable ways. In our world, there wasn’t a battle in Union Square in 1952, yet in this world, that battle has begun. In our world, Tammany Hall was owned by an international union for garment workers, and the Society of St. Tammany had already dissolved; in this world, Tammany Hall is owned by a magically-preserved Boss Tweed. In our world, New York wasn’t gripped in a crisis of Communist infiltration; in this world, the National Guard is already rolling through the streets, setting up checkpoints.
This isn’t exactly our world anymore. It probably hasn’t been an exact match for a long time, so why have the same people been born into it?
Last chapter was a gesture towards an explanation, which I think would be fun to discuss openly. We saw some rumblings from Schuler about the gods picking and choosing elements to alter, to hew towards a particular course for history. That mechanism, however obscure and minute, is part of a broader recognition that this world diverges from our expectations at least a little bit. If we’re going to take this setting very, very seriously, we may need some explanation for how the same people have been born in that world as in our world.
The rest of the explanation, which we will eventually assemble, comes from the Baron’s philosophy. This doesn’t mean the Baron is right, but it is a gesture towards one narrative that could explain the difference. Look forward to arc 18 for that last piece, but feel free to speculate in the comments.
Suffice to say, I think this will be a very entertaining historical tension. It is a small set of deliberate differences, so that this story may expand into its final, violent act. Enjoy!
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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New York’s theology was born out of Boss Tweed’s fear. He led a cult whose primary purpose was to ensure the afterlife and meet death boldly, yet he’d extended his own life beyond a century at extreme cost. The economics were appalling. Each unnatural day cost him three days of prestige. He clung to the temporal world with an unholy amount of money and a desperate faith, believing that he played an ongoing role in the divine plan.
“We will create the afterlife on earth, or we will obviate the need for the afterlife altogether.” Tweed’s insanity projected over reality.
This madman had confined the Baron and Zombie to the Tammany Hall lockup. It wasn’t an iron-barred jail in some cellar beneath 19th century flagstones. There was no descent into New York’s underground, nor any rickety climb up to an attic space intended for ventilation. Instead, they were led up to the third story within the temple, to an unassuming baby-blue door marked with a tarnished brass placard, which read, “Caretaker’s Room.”
This was the sole sanctuary for the Tammany Hall temple, and if you opened it, there was a “natural” room within, which could serve double-duty as occult lockup for anyone—even the invincible man and his ward.
The Baron sat at a richly lacquered walnut desk, poking at a plate of food with a long-tined fork. The vast, plush chair at his back was far beyond any caretaker’s salary, and likely a seat for Boss Tweed himself in case he ever wished into debt.
The Zombie stood across from d’Holbach, gently stroking the emerald spread of arsenic-green wallpaper, inspecting a discolored region where a window had been removed, bricked up, and hidden away beneath renovations from the Gilded Age.
Despite its mundane appearance, that verdant paper and its backings were as strong as the Zombie himself. While part of a sanctuary, they were inviolable. Miracles protected this room, producing odd interactions with his invincible body.
“Feels weird,” the Zombie explained. “Too smooth.” He tapped the fingertips of his right hand against the wallpaper. “Like I’m stopped short. Not quite touching.” In his left hand, he clasped the Cat o ‘Nine Lives. He’d never tire of holding it, but he could grow bored, and the last five hours had driven him a little batty. He tested this enclosure for fun.
“Miracles touching miracles!” Meister Schuler called from outside the sanctuary door. He was tilting to and fro in a wooden rocking chair, and the color pages of a glossy news magazine spread across his lap like a sleeping cat. He didn’t read the articles; whenever he lost focus, he stared at them and mumbled about strange tasks in far away lands.
The Zombie chuckled. “Really nothing else like it, is there?”
“When you hold the Cat, I hear harmony and melody,” Schuler said warmly. “But the best miracles are careful, isolated. They’re so small, unasked for, sparkling in all the intimate moments. I see them through the walls at night, twinkling like stars. Tiny fixes, the small stones defining the flow of history’s river, each as precious as a diamond.”
The Baron turned away from his half-eaten spread of fatty meats, cold and congealed, and the stale bread and wilted vegetables that accompanied them. Most of what their jailor said was useless, even annoying—much like the rocking of his wooden chair—but this was philosophically interesting nonsense. “Are they wishes then, these little miracles?”
Schuler smiled like he was sharing a deep secret and peered at the Baron over his lustrous copper frames. “Nobody asks for them. They’re too small, like motes, no brighter than when you press your hands to your eyes. I used to think they were dreams.”
The Baron grunted. Maybe these motes were merely Schuler’s hallucinations, but d’Holbach was curious enough to press the subject. “What are they then?” he asked.
“Adjustments, Baron. Things aren’t always as they should be, but the world is under the gods’ grace. History shifts at their urging, you see—”
“No, no, I get that part. You’re suggesting that the gods are guiding history. I’m asking you, what are the gods altering?”
“Conceptions. Only those who are born have souls and can die. Thus, the gods are picking souls by altering the elements that guide the birth and growth of children.”
The Zombie grinned. “What, they’re picking which sperms and eggs combine?”
“Something like that,” Schuler replied, “or a finer manipulation.”
With a huff of disappointment, the Baron recognized a strange twist on a very old philosophical position from a 6th century Diviner, Aeneas of Gaza. His words had survived in the records of the Eastern Orthodox Church and thus reached Elizabeth for inclusion in Apostasy. Specifically, Aeneas had rejected the doctrine of “the eternal duration of the world,” stating that any divine plan would necessarily contain the elements of its own completion and eventual dissolution; he’d also argued that souls came into being with their bodies and were formed around them. In short, no soul existed before a particular person was born.
The ideas of Aeneas must’ve formed the foundations of Meister Schuler’s belief system. The Diviner thought the world was about to end, and yet he also believed that the gods were choosing the people who were born into it. Only Aeneas of Gaza could reconcile the conflicts in these beliefs, wherein the gods would fuss over the details of a doomed Earth.
After a long moment of appraisal, Schuler said, “You’re angry, Baron.”
d’Holbach shrugged aggressively. “I expected novelty, not heresies based on old ideas recorded in Apostasy.”
Schuler laughed warmly. “Oh, silly devil! You hear novelty, but you mistake it for stolen thinking because every thought has been uttered before.” He eased the rocking chair forward, no longer rolling back and forth, but focusing with clarity through his bifocals. “Heed me. I am an old wizard, and I’ve started to see the patterns in the clouds of miracles, and they are real.” Meister Schuler looked up at the walls, at the roof, then at the Baron and Zombie. “This place, these people—they aren’t supposed to be here. Today is a very different day, starting in a very different building. You understand?”
“No,” the Baron admitted, “but I’m listening.”
Schuler pointed with a finger at the door, then at a distant voice passing far down the hall, and finally at a mote of something invisible, like dust on an errant breeze. “Tammany Hall only persists as a result of wishes. It’s outside the course of natural history, far afield of normal. Without wishes, it doesn’t exist, and thus I say—we aren’t here, and there isn’t a battle in the streets. Except—here we are, and out there, men are dying. It’s a divine difference. We’re on a side path through history, yoked back towards similar results.”
The Baron squinted. There was a familiar concept hidden in this, one which prodded at his oddest considerations of what the occult might materially be. “Did you read my letters to Tweed? November, 1944? Or any of my other correspondence?”
The Baron hadn’t met Schuler before this week, but there were several copies of his theories floating around in the Americas. It was likely the Diviner had read one of them.
Meister Schuler brought his finger around to point at the Baron, and he smiled, blinking slowly but saying nothing more.
“Don’t make fun of me,” the Baron said. “Those ideas basically are science-fiction. They’re toy examples, showing what’s possible in principle. I don’t believe in them.”
Schuler let his hand drop onto his lap, lightly crinkling the color pages of his magazine. “They’re unknowable,” he said kindly. “But your core assumptions fit many worldviews. Excuse me while I return your scientific ideas of changing histories to their religious roots.”
The Baron huffed and dismissed the man. These were pointless abstractions and suppositions with no bearing on the crisis at hand. General Osman had ordered Meister Schuler to guard the Baron, with explicit requirements that he would neither sleep nor leave his post until such time as the Baron surrendered custody of the Cat.
Right now, only Phyllis’s progress mattered. Either something would happen soon, or they’d wait here until the late afternoon, Denisov would leave without the Cat, and the whole world would angle towards much darker ends.
“That’s it?” the Zombie asked the Baron, breaking the silence.
“What?” d’Holbach asked.
“You’re not going to keep talking with him?”
“No. I don’t like aggravation.”
The Zombie guffawed mockingly. “Friend, he’s talking about time travel—”
“I know—”
“He might be the only other person we’ve met who treats your philosophical letters with respect. Aren’t you interested?”
“The sci-fi details are just storytelling,” the Baron insisted. “I don’t actually know anything, except that I can tell a story in which the so-called gods aren’t divine.”
Meister Schuler was smiling pleasantly. “Aren’t you bored, Baron?”
“I am! You’ve had me sitting in here for hours.”
“Then why not chat?”
The Baron huffed. “I am not here to be made fun of. I’m sincere, and you, Schuler, are my strict opposite. If the so-called gods are guiding history, then we believe in fundamentally different reasons for that guidance.”
Schuler chuckled.
The Zombie shrugged. “Well I’m bored too, and I’d like to chat with him.”
d’Holbach waved the Zombie off. “Be my guest, but leave me out of it. I speculate. I don’t give in to wild flights of fancy.” He paused, realizing he was getting heated for no other reason than the Zombie’s entertainment. “Actually, Schuler, could you pass that magazine to the Zombie? I’d like a few moments of peace, and the man just needs something to read.”
Schuler lifted the magazine off his lap, holding it up like a shield over his face. “Would you like it?”
The Zombie raised his eyebrows. “Sure, if you’re done with it—”
“Flap!” Schuler wished, and the open pages of the magazine leaped from his hands and violently snapped back like a diving bird drawing its wings to its sides, accelerating into an arc towards the Zombie—who instantly snatched it out of the air with a predator’s reflexes, clenching its glossy spine between the fingers of his right hand.
The Cat remained locked in his left.
“Bravo!” the Baron cried, duly impressed by both the surprise wish and the sheer speed of the Zombie’s response.
Schuler clapped, and the Zombie bowed twice.
“Will that keep you distracted?” the Baron asked, not unkindly.
The Zombie grinned. “I’ll give you as much peace as it takes to read this. Then we’re talking about weird philosophy.”
“Fine. Thank you.” The Baron checked his wristwatch, seeking the angles of its glowing hands—about 11:30 in the morning. They’d been here for about five hours, and hopefully wouldn’t remain here much longer. “I’m going to make an early lunch out of my leftovers,” he declared. “Schuler, will you be fine without company?”
“I’m never alone,” the Diviner muttered, already losing focus. “The gods are with me.”
The Baron picked up his fork, opting to fortify himself. “Then I’ll enjoy this little slice of peace.”
Enzu came to visit them just before noon. He’d trimmed his salt and pepper beard a couple of inches and changed into plainer clothes, but the heft of his jowls filled out his broad face, and he habitually picked at the edge of his plaster cast with a finger. He patted Schuler on the shoulder and asked permission to speak with the Baron.
Schuler lolled back and whispered to his part-time watcher, “It’s raining in Qatar. There is a great task to drown a British officer in the oil-slicked waters near Doha.”
Enzu took this as permission and entered the sanctuary. “Baron d’Holbach.”
The Baron had been taking short naps in Tweed’s plush chair. He straightened up and raised a hand. “Enzu Guerra! I thought we wouldn’t have a chance to talk.”
Enzu pointed to a wooden chair across the table, old pine with a yellowing lacquer. Any man seated across from Tweed would be shorter, less comfortable. “May I?”
“Go ahead.”
The Zombie was standing beside the Baron, reading the news magazine. His free hand supported the spine. His fingers wrapped around the Cat and pinched together, turning the pages. He paused, looking over the glossy pictures at Enzu, and gave the enforcer a kind nod and a genuine smile.
Enzu pulled out the chair and sat down. “Zed, good to see you as well. It’s been a long morning. Three incidents in Lower Manhattan alone.”
“Murders?” the Zombie asked.
“Absolutely.”
“Do tell?” the Baron prompted. Enzu wanted to chat, and d’Holbach wanted to hear whatever news the man saw fit to bring them.
The enforcer snorted with faux disbelief. “It’s been wild. Twice we shot scouts from the fuckin’ Commies. Just like you said, it’s a fuckin’ fifth column.”
The Baron nodded. “They’ve been all over town since the fighting at Red Hook yesterday.” He gestured. “What about the third incident?”
“One of our boys shot at the National Guard.”
The Baron sat up. “At troops?”
“Yeah, I know! Confused ‘em for more Commies. No more casualties after that, thank the gods, but they arrested three of our boys.”
“So the Guard aren’t aiming for Tammany then?”
“Nah, not yet at least. Blame went on the mob.” Enzu scooted forward in his chair. “I tell you though, it’s bad. Real bad. The radio is babbling conspiracies, saying the Commies are making their move on the whole damn country.”
The Baron pushed aside the empty platter and fork. “It’s not entirely a conspiracy, but they’re mostly after the Cat.”
“I know! That’s why it’s so goddamn crazy.” He glanced around, as if a Communist might be listening in right now. “How long do you think these people waited on our home turf?”
“The fifth column? Years, don’t you think?”
Enzu nodded quickly, excited by his involvement. “You really stirred the shit, Baron. Only two days since you came to town, and people are scared witless.”
d’Holbach grunted an affirmation. “What’s Langley’s response?”
“Also bad. Gagliano says the CIA pushed the National Guard to deploy just after dawn.”
“Incredible.”
“Yeah, and Senator McCarthy has been hassling HUAC and the FBI with radio speeches, accusing them of resting while America is brought down from the inside. His quote.”
“McCarthy said that?”
“Yeah. There’s jeeps in the streets, rifles at hand, the works. Word is they’re forming a dragnet around the city and at major bottlenecks between the boroughs.”
“So they’re looking for me,” the Baron said.
“Maybe.” Enzu glanced at the Zombie, at the artifact clenched in his left hand. “Do they know you have the Cat?”
The Zombie smirked. “Not officially, but I think Agent Heckhaus figured it out.”
“Heckhaus…” Enzu squinted. “I know that name.”
“He worked a task here last week. Order of the Cincinatti.”
“Ah, yeah. I met him once. Hope it’s not twice, eh?” He knocked knuckles twice on the wooden table between them. “Stubborn guy. Smug too.”
“Did you hear that Boss Tweed is keeping me here?”
“Yeah, I’m sorry about that, Baron. Your story has been going around the crew. I still think you did the right thing, coming here, but sometimes the Boss can outsmart himself. He figures you might not make it back to your Orthodox contacts, so he figures you shouldn’t even try. Too risk averse, you know?”
“Mm.” The Baron saw no value in correcting Enzu about Tweed’s exact motivations.
“Anyways,” Enzu continued, “we all got dealt a bad hand. At least you’re getting a chance to fold before your life is in the pot. That’s good, right?”
The Baron briefly thought of Marco, the long-suffering teen who’d carried the Cat across the city, but he kept his focus on the task at hand. “We’re not out of the game yet. You’re capturing scouts, which means CPUSA is pulling intel for the Bolsheviks. If the Soviets sniff out the Cat’s location, they might try taking it.”
Enzu shook his head. “We got better discipline than that. Whenever anyone asks, we say you were last seen returning to the Biltmore.”
The Baron raised his eyebrows. “People are asking?”
“Sure. I mean, within New York though. Only the nobles and enforcers really know where you are.”
“The triumvirate or the lesser nobles?” the Baron asked.
“Both. Among the lesser nobles, it’s Osman’s war planners, mostly.”
The Baron disliked the war planners. He’d met them in the field several times since Salem. The scene was always the same—a gaggle of old men with handlebar mustaches and warrior dreams, standing around card tables under pop-up tents while chatting about the nobility of occult battle.
For them, the moment before violence was like the prelude to a gala; they anticipated the spectacle, the glory, and the insubstantial rewards of martial honor. None of them whispered with fear about death, because most of these war planners were the children of last century’s soldiers. They’d adopted the style and mannerisms of their fathers without any experience of “noble” combat.
In the prime of their youth, they hadn’t gone to war in France or Germany and crouched in a cold trench while their souls eroded. They hadn’t faced the endless heartbeat of the mechanical beast, the lub-dub of shells falling eternally, exploding and interrupting sleep. They hadn’t clutched gas masks while waiting for the rotten floral stench to signal that someone was about to die in visceral misery.
They’d gone to universities or worked in financial institutions while their peers had learned about the grim efficiency of modernity. They’d celebrated new luxuries while others had watched the fruits of science on the battlefield—impersonal, industrialized murder.
Those men in toy uniforms were well-studied, well-dressed, and capable of handling the logistics that made the New York cult’s military efforts run smoothly, but none of them were ready to battle the Soviets or the National Guard. They were only planners, not fighters.
“Just don’t let your guard down,” the Baron suggested. “If CPUSA comes knocking in the next few hours, I need you to come get us. We’ll need to speak with Tweed.” Truthfully, the Baron just wanted Enzu at hand when it came time to escape.
“You know something I don’t?” Enzu asked.
“No, but CPUSA was able to track us yesterday. If they show up here, I want Tweed to hear it from my own mouth. They’re a real threat.”
“I stole their car!” Schuler suddenly shouted.
“They’re driving vehicles from the UN pool,” the Baron explained, “all Soviet-owned. And they have occult combat training. It’s a sophisticated operation.”
Enzu frowned. “I doubt they’ll make it all the way here Baron.”
“Yes, but if they do, will you come to us?”
Enzu shrugged. “If I’m free, I guess.”
The Baron nodded once, as if accepting a promise. “Thank you, Enzu.”
“You’re welcome.” Enzu’s enthusiasm didn’t extend to promising any favors to New York prisoners, but he hadn’t explicitly refused either, and that gave the Baron some hope.
If and when someone attacked Tammany, d’Holbach wanted to put some distance between him and Schuler before trying to run. If Enzu escorted them alone, the enforcer would be the weak link in the chain of custody. He was sympathetic to their cause, knew the dangers of the Zombie intimately, and would likely give up and release them without bloodshed.
Of course, the Baron wasn’t relying solely on this possibility. If Enzu failed to retrieve them—or if Schuler followed them closely through the building—then the next best way out of Tammany was in the company of multiple high-ranking New York nobles and their personal enforcers. If there was any fighting, Tweed would probably move immediately to one of several neighboring safehouses in the city, and the Baron might be able to go with him.
Once they were moving, it’d be far easier for the Baron to find a moment of inattention when all sides were locked in conflict. Then he could flee.
Enzu scooted his little wooden chair back, preparing to depart. “I should go, but do you need anything else? More food? Something to drink?”
d’Holbach could use a couple of things, now that the man had mentioned it. “Can you spare any cigars? Also, I need to use the restroom.”
“Just walk down the hall and take a left,” Enzu said. “Tammany has guards all over. They know you won’t be leaving.” He rose. “I’ll grab up a couple of cigars too. This place is lousy with smokes and booze. Got any preferences for your stogie?”
“Can I have something that isn’t a stogie?” the Baron asked.
Enzu laughed. “I’ll pester one of the old boys for some of their personal supplies.”
“Bring me something pungent to eat,” the Zombie said.
Enzu waved to the Zombie with his uninjured hand. “I got you, Zed. Baron, I’ll walk you to the restroom.”
“Thank you.” The Baron rose and went out with the enforcer, past Schuler and down the hall to the public restrooms. A few random New York accountants and record-keepers gave them a worried glance, but Enzu was trustworthy and probably had a kill list as long as his forearm. If he was walking a man to the bathroom, they were safe.
In a claustrophobic water closet—likely twice updated with new plumbing since its original construction—the Baron relieved himself and washed his face in front of a mirror. He was still wearing a white cotton t-shirt, one size too small. The short sleeves showed off his muscles. It was undignified—what was he, a ditch digger trying to impress women at a bar? At least it’d be a little easier to run without a jacket.
He scratched his scalp. The stubble was thick and black. He’d gotten into the habit of shaving his head when powdered wigs were common, then continued the habit because he’d needed to fake balding and age. Now it was an integral part of his personal fashion. A baron was immaculate and tidy, curating an atmosphere of wisdom and refinement. He wasn’t a roughly shorn grunt—except today. He didn’t look like anyone important.
He asked himself, why was he so vain? He spoke aloud, “Vanity of vanities, said the Preacher, vanity of vanities. All is vanity.”
Ecclesiastes was the Bible’s darkest book. The Preacher would’ve claimed that the struggle to right the world was futile vanity and vexation of spirit. “That which is crooked cannot be made straight.” d’Holbach could hardly remember the chapters, but some of the quotes were unforgettable. Vanity is what made him stand in front of a mirror; was vanity also what drove him to save the world? Was it vanity to believe he could save anything? If it was, he still had to try.
There was one thing in Ecclesiastes that he believed wasn’t true. If the Preacher had known about nuclear weapons, he wouldn’t have written these words: “The Earth abides forever.”
d’Holbach returned to the sanctuary to find Enzu standing inside, holding out an ashtray laden with two cigars, a lighter, and a cutter—all the tools of the art of cigar smoking. “From High Oracle Gagliano.”
“Thanks.” The Baron accepted the gift. They were fine cigars, true Cubans, very dark and sweet. “Tell him I appreciate his tolerance.”
Enzu smiled. “Do you know what he said to me?”
“The Atheist is an evil man, but he’ll appreciate a good cigar?”
Enzu upgraded to a grin. “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”
The Zombie raised his right hand, clenched around a tiny sample bottle full of opaque red liquid, as bright as a volcanic sunset and as ripe as a field of peppers. His magazine was spread on the table now, forcefully opened to a random page. “Look what he got me,” he said cheerily. “Mexican pepper sauce, the first step to an early grave.”
The Baron snickered softly. “A drunkard’s grave,” he corrected, recalling the exact political cartoon that’d defined the Zombie’s personality for around three months during Prohibition. The invincible man had deliberately scandalized teetotallers by hitting every step down a short stair of absurd superstitions, right outside their meeting halls.
Once, a gaggle of old women came outside to drive him off a Boston stoop with strikes of their purses and bags, even while he swallowed whole pickles covered in pepper sauces and soaked himself in wild pours of clear vodka.
“I’ll be around the building for a few hours,” Enzu told the Baron. “We’ll catch up before I go, all right?”
“Of course, and thanks.”
Enzu paused at the door to add one last comment: “Just leave the ashtray on the table when you’re done.”
“I will. See you, Enzu.”
The enforcer waved to them both and left, skirting around Schuler, who was still slumped in his seat.
The Baron sat down in Tweed’s plush chair and arranged the ashtray on the table in front of him, with two cigars and a cutter beside it.
“You treat smoking like a tea ceremony,” the Zombie said.
“It’s pleasing.” d’Holbach picked the fine guillotine cutter, chose a tightly wrapped Cuban, and sliced a V-shaped notch out of one end. Gagliano didn’t know much about smoking, but he had people who told him what to buy. Becoming the High Oracle had forced him to acquire a sense of taste and refinement, which meant good cigars for valued guests.
The Zombie opened the tiny pepper bottle and tossed the cork into his mouth, quickly chewing and swallowing it in a common preamble. A couple quick sniffs over the crimson sauce. “I asked for something pungent, but he brought me the best.”
“Is that a compliment, or spite?” the Baron asked playfully.
“Ha! That man attacked me in an oyster bar. It’s a compliment.”
“Is that so?”
The Zombie tipped the pepper sauce bottle back like he was sampling a fine liquor. A few clicks of his tongue, then a smile. “That kind of man doesn’t know how to be passive-aggressive. He’s all earnest, all the time. Makes me glad I didn’t kill him.”
“That’s good to hear.” The Baron lit his zippo, carefully cooked the end of his cigar with a few passes of golden-yellow flame, waited some seconds for the burn to die down, and finally drew with a few pulls of his lips. Warm smoke flowed across his tongue, and beyond the taste of burning leaves, it was nutty, peppery, and very soft. A fine cigar to cushion a harsh day, an indulgence for a final hour of peace before the storm.
The Zombie tipped back his pepper sauce a couple more times, then grew bored of sipping and shoved the entire sample-size bottle into his mouth like a snake swallowing an egg—a maneuver that’d make anyone else violently choke or at least gag. He closed his jaw, and somewhere in the soft tissues of his throat, vice-like forces constricted, shattering glass with an audible pop and series of gnarly crinkles. Shards broke into razor sand, soon swallowed.
Schuler stirred at the sound, focusing through his bifocals at the Zombie. “Nothing classy about a drunkard’s grave. Fragile lives. Glass to sand.” He faded a little. “Drunk outside tonight, you see. It’ll be dangerous outdoors, but who cares? Not the drunk.” Fading further still, he slumped, mumbling. “Icy air falls like a hammer over the border of Kazakhstan. The mountains are like a wall, and the prices are high if you want a guide through the Dzungarian Gate.”
“What’s the task?” the Zombie asked the Diviner.
“Mm?” Schuler blinked lazily at the invincible man.
“You’re talking about a task, yeah?” the Zombie prompted.
Meister Schuler brightened. “Yes! She walks from China to the crater where the meteor fell.”
“She?” the Baron asked idly. There were many Artemisians on Earth, but Elizabeth had last been spotted in Central Asia.
“Can’t say,” Schuler said, sagging again.
“Can’t say what?” the Baron prodded.
“It wasn’t part of the deal,” Schuler muttered, then collapsed like a man who’d spent every last iota of energy and was finally exhausted.
“What deal?” the Zombie prodded.
Meister Schuler didn’t respond to any outside stimulus now. The Baron supposed that he wouldn’t react much unless they tried to leave with the Cat o’ Nine Lives.
“Fair enough,” the Zombie said, reading the magazine on the table.
The Baron finished smoking in silent repose. The cigar held its ash well, breaking off cleanly into the ceramic tray. When the flavor began to change, to grow bitter, he passed it up—still cooking—for the Zombie to eat.
The Zombie put out the cigar on his tongue, then kneeled beside the Baron while he chewed on the tobacco leaves. “What do you think?” he mumbled quietly around a full mouth.
“It’s nearly the half-hour mark,” the Baron whispered. “If anything happens, it’ll be soon.”
“Geese of a feather, flock together, the Zombie muttered.
The Baron chuckled. It was likely that Schuler was always listening, but the Diviner was unlikely to understand the principle behind that trite idiom. It meant that whatever the Baron tried to do next, the Zombie would be ready to help. Like two geese, they’d flap about and wreck things, making chaos, but only once there was a moment without attentive jailors.
From time to time, the Baron watched the glowing dials on his watch.
Phyllis couldn’t delay much further if she planned to break them out of Tammany Hall. The schedule was tight. While Denisov’s flight would leave around five, the Soviets would leave the UN Plaza at least a couple of hours earlier to work through any unusual obstacles or cut through any remaining red tape with the US government.
While the Soviets were waiting at the airport, or better while they were still on the streets, they’d be vulnerable to approach. There’d be a solid window for delivering the Cat.
Schuler stirred exactly at twelve-thirty. “Gunfire,” he said sharply, though nobody else could hear what he sensed. “There’s blood on the flagstones of Union Square Park.”
The Zombie looked up from his magazine. “Time?” he asked the Baron.
The Baron tapped his watch. “Half-hour on the dot. It’s coordinated.”
“They’re attacking in the park though? Not here?” the Zombie asked.
“I’d guess it’s a feint attack.” The Baron stood from the plush chair, stretching his legs and rolling his shoulders. “Once New York responds, the real attack hits here.”
“That’d work,” the Zombie agreed. “Who’s attacking?”
“I don’t know,” the Baron admitted. “I doubt they’re allies.” He slipped the last cigar into his pants pocket with the lighter and the guillotine cutter. “Schuler, you awake?”
The Diviner stirred again, rubbing the sides of his head and groaning. “I don’t know them! I can hear them, and I don’t know any of them. I don’t know, I don’t know!”
“He’s awake,” the Zombie concluded.
“I don’t want to focus!” Schuler closed his eyes and squirmed in the chair. “Damnation!” His left leg began to spasm, stomping the floor rapidly. “I need to rest! To! Rest!” But he couldn’t relax, no matter what strange psychological requirements he carried, because there was violence outside Tammany Hall. After a moment, he jumped to his feet, shouting, “You wanted to see Tweed, you devils? You wanted to speak with my king as his kingdom is stained?”
The Baron stared down the fickle madman with some worry. This wasn’t exactly what he wanted, but it was better than staying here. “Are you truly offering to help?”
Schuler nodded in two violent jags, nearly shaking his bifocals from his face.
“Then yes,” the Baron answered, “if Enzu isn’t coming—”
“I will take you!” the Diviner barked, waved them out of the room as if evacuating a burning building. “Come! Quickly! We’re going, so hurry!”
Author’s Note:
We start one of the largest arcs of heavily rewritten content. I’m very proud of this new version, so look forward to a good time as we really tear into the rising action of this final act of the book.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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