CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warnings.

The Baron was standing with Phyllis along the front wall near the window, where they’d listened to both the Zombie and Malik swaying the hearts of men. He held the Zombie’s bowler over his own chest, hiding his thundering pulse behind its shield.

Relief and disgust mixed within him. The Pact would be respected, but Malik was unwilling to bend on the fundamental conceit of his occult campaign. Everyone else could die, even his own mercenaries. If the Baron wanted Phyllis, Barilla, Martin, and the street gang to survive, then they still needed help from the Anastasia boys.

How long had it been since they’d made the call? Likely mere minutes had passed, but the exact passage of time was lost to him. Violence distorted everything. Dread pulled every second taut, until they seemed to fill the length of an hour.

“Jesus Christ,” Phyllis muttered. “Who is Malik?”

“A Soviet cultist,” the Baron answered. “That’s their idea of a mercy killing.”

She gave him a look as if he were a disgusting man.

“It’s what they’re thinking,” he noted.

“That’s monstrous.”

“If you can’t imagine the desperation that makes monsters…”

“I can, but that’s men like Jacono.”

Jacono the psychopath. The Baron knew these people were different. They were victims of blackmail and felt death was better than a lifetime of shame and castigation. It was Malik who shaped their psychopathic behavior. His orders and threats drove them to commit atrocities, because he took the choice out of their hands and claimed the responsibility for himself.

The Zombie jogged over from the front door. He offered the radio to the Baron, and the Baron offered the bowler to the Zombie. As they exchanged these tools, he said quietly, “It won’t be long now. Schuler, CPUSA. They’re out of options. Almost out of time.”

“Are you certain?” the Baron asked.

“No, but they must know there’s a limited window to get this done.”

Phyllis scowled. “I was hoping they’d back off after hearing from the Zombie.”

“They’re former Communists,” the Baron reminded Phyllis. “They don’t have a choice. They’re being blackmailed by a Bolshevik.”

“Why though?” she asked.

“I told you, they want Barilla. He knows secrets.”

“What does he know?”

“I shouldn’t say—”

“What do you know, boss?” she asked Barilla.

Barilla grunted, standing with his street gang. “Where this artifact is, a little stone cat.”

Phyllis squinted for a moment, trying to imagine why the Soviets would bring a veritable platoon of native soldiers to exterminate Americans over “a little stone cat.” Then it struck her right in the adrenal gland, a flush of fear and eyes widened with stress.

The Cat o’ Nine Lives was listed in Apostasy as one of the great ancient artifacts of the world. It had played an instrumental role in the eventual destruction of the London Cult, keeping multiple Russian cultists alive through a pitched occult battle.

“The Cat o’ Nine Lives?” she asked quietly.

Barilla shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Everyone, listen up,” the Baron addressed the gangsters. “If you repeat what we’ve said here, you’ll make yourself a target. Don’t repeat a word of this to anyone.”

“He’s telling the truth boys,” Phyllis added. “Mum is the word. I don’t want you to end up like Bobby or Stubs.” She pointed at the boy whose throat had been shot open. He was pale. “Someone cover his face, please.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the youngest gangster, who removed his dress shirt and handed it to another boy. They quickly veiled the miserable gaze of the recently dead. It was a mixed expression, appearing angry and envious of the living.

“What do we do next?” Barilla asked the Baron, not seeking advice but criticizing the leader by asking unanswerable questions.

The Baron never shied away from these challenges. “Nothing has changed. We wait here until the rest of Anastasia’s crew arrives. It’s the best option.”

“It really is,” the Zombie agreed.

“So you’re saying we’re fucked?” Barilla asked. “Because I know what I heard, and I’m with the Zombie. They’ll attack soon. They’ll sweep this place out, everyone but you.”

“I still have prestige,” the Baron replied, “and the Zombie is invincible. We can wait it out.”

“We can try,” the Zombie muttered softly.

Barilla huffed. “Sure, you’re protected, but me, Martin, Phyllis, the boys? We’re fucked hard. The only thing you have to risk is our lives.”

“That’s not true,” the Baron said.

“Convince me.”

The Baron played for time. “What do you mean?” he asked, even though he knew exactly what Barilla meant. Why should the Baron care about their lives? What could he say to a cynical man to make him believe in the Baron’s leadership?

“Why do we matter?” Barilla pressed.

The Baron sighed. “For a practical man, you need a practical answer.”

“Spit it out.”

“You know where your son is, Barilla.”

“His son?” Phyllis asked. “What does… did he feed—” Her words rose nearly to a shout, but the woman stopped just before revealing the truth to everyone present.

“That’s right,” Barilla said, “the only valuable thing in this entire equation is me.”

Somewhere on the street outside, a vehicle engine rumbled into life.

“All the more reason to stay in cover and wait for backup,” the Baron said. “If we’re going to fight, we’ll need firepower. It can’t be long, can it?” he asked Phyllis.

“They’re not police,” Phyllis said to the Baron. “They aren’t waiting on patrol. They have to collect men, weapons. They’ve got to group up before coming here.”

“So we got two options,” Barilla said. “We wait, or I bargain for everyone’s release.”

“We can’t bargain with Malik, not without the threat of mutually assured destruction, and the Zombie won’t lift a finger for anyone but me,” the Baron said.

“Baron,” the Zombie called.

“He’ll at least help you to help us, won’t he?” Barilla asked.

d’Holbach held up a hand to finish his thought. “He can’t guarantee your safety.”

“Baron!” the Zombie repeated, louder.

He glanced at his friend. “Yes?”

“It’s that panel truck down the street—” the Zombie began.

Somewhere in the distance, a patrol of fully automatic guns ripped into the air. If the Baron didn’t know better, he would’ve sworn they were strings of firecrackers on the 4th of July. A moment later, rifles snapped like shattering stones, and the truck’s engine roared above the din like an ascendant lion, bursting from the brush, an ambush. Tires screamed as they left rubber on pavement. Louder, rushing the building.

The Baron didn’t have time to think, but intuition cried out for action. He bolted for the side wall, roaring at the top of his lungs, “Move!” The volume of his voice and his burst of motion argued convincingly. Everyone but the Zombie moved, and barely in time.

There was a tremendous bang, two tires bottoming as the half-ton panel truck struck the curb exactly one heartbeat before it crashed into the building, and the front brick wall erupted into a calamity and a spectacle. Mortar failed, windows vanished into glimmers, debris flowed into a clay-red plume of dust, and a hundred bricks clapped together in a violent ovation, tumbling, pouring, spilling off the long curved hood of the panel truck like a wave crashing over the prow of a battleship. One of the factory tables was swept away, swallowed by the sudden onslaught of momentum. Children screamed, covering their heads. Adults shouted.

The Zombie, still too close, whooped with joy as a shockwave of bricks threw him backwards onto the floor. The Baron’s mind focused on that detail. His champion was out of commission for the next breath, and he wasn’t the only figure moving in the plume.

Stones fell. Dust thinned enough to see. “Strength!” shouted a man, and out of a pile of collapsing bricks, a clay-red arm jutted, casting aside a layer of fresh wreckage like a blanket. That was enough to tell the Baron everything he needed to know. Meister Schuler, the Diviner of New York, the Wizard of the East, had been literally driven back on the cattle guard of a heavy panel truck and rammed into a brick wall, and he’d survived.

The Zombie recognized it too. “Schuler!” he yelled joyously, flailing to shed his own layer of wreckage. His bowler was in his hand, waving away clouds of choking particulates.

“Zombie!” the Baron yelled, slapping the bare wall beside him. “Break us out! Here!”

Figures stirred in the panel truck, barely visible behind the shattered windshield and bent truck doors. A driver unbuckled. A passenger threw aside a damaged hunting rifle and pulled a sidearm from a holster. Somewhere in the back, the rear doors of the truck were banged open. Troops were unloading. An assault was underway, a pitched battle against a legendary enemy.

With his back to the ground, Meister Schuler whipped up his legs above the rubble, folding them back over his head and flexing his spine like a professional gymnast. It was an absurd sight for an older man in a damaged cassock, whose chest and belly were painted with inhuman quantities of dark blood and bright clay dust.

Then throwing his legs forward, Schuler kipped up onto his feet and landed with his hands against his knees. Chunks of brick threatened to undermine his footing, only to crumble beneath his shoes like they’d vanished beneath the treads of a tank.

The passenger aimed his sidearm expertly.

“Bullets!” Schuler wished, implying everything else with a wave of his hand. Heedless of any further danger, he leaned down, searching around his feet as the man in the truck unloaded a 1911 pistol from one end of the magazine to the other, eight bullets singing an ode to wild panic. Rounds punched through a wrecked windshield and bit into the bricks on the ground behind Schuler. Little puffs of red dust celebrated each improbably missed shot.

Children shrieked again. Phyllis was yelling something at the Baron, but his brain couldn’t process it. He could only understand Schuler’s unfair strength. Skilled Diviners were capable of envisioning the world with intentions sharp enough to cut concepts out of thought alone. Meister Schuler didn’t need to vocalize his desires. He was able to convene with the gods in silence, though he famously preferred to wish with a gesture and a word.

“Baron!” Phyllis roared. “We need a way out!”

Shocked back to life, the Baron yelled again: “Zombie! Now!”

The Zombie pushed to his feet, following orders without question. Instantly sprinting, he arced towards the wall next to the Baron, who leaned away, expecting another crash.

The Zombie struck the brick—and stopped dead.

It’s sometimes said that comedy is time multiplied by distance, but everyone was seconds away from death, and no one was laughing. In general, everyone’s sense of humor had died five minutes ago along with two children.

Schuler finally bent down, picked up the distorted mess of his crushed bifocals, and said simply, “Glasses.” With a shake of his hand—in that moment where human vision couldn’t trace any motion—his bifocals were restored. Lenses glimmered in lustrous copper frames, and with open eyes, Schuler stood, set his glasses on his dust-caked nose, and frowned at the man who’d shot at him. The man who’d just finished reloading his pistol.

Schuler scooped up a whole brick, saying, “Strength.” Then he whipped his arm in an overhead pitch with enough speed to audibly cut the air. The brick tore through the glittering angles and cracks of the safety windshield, finding them no more substantial than a gossamer web, and it buried itself in the passenger’s sinuses like a stone in thick mud. Thock. A human being was reduced to a second-rate Dick Tracy villain. Nothing resembling a face remained. A ruddy complexion of cracked brick and fresh blood slumped forward onto the dashboard.

The Baron could hardly understand it. Had Schuler made both himself and the brick strong enough to crush a human skull?

The Zombie took three steps back, then threw himself at full force into the wall again. Bricks shifted and mortar shattered to prevent injury, but the wall itself only bent far enough to catch his displaced mass with a pillow soft impact. “Fuck!” the Zombie yelled with frustration, bouncing back from his own crater.

“Get us out of here!” Barilla roared at the Zombie.

“Get ready!” Phyllis yelled, waving the boys forward. She expected the Zombie to break through. The Baron ought to turn away, to be ready, to think of what they’d do next. Where they should go. Out of the alley? Into the building next door? He ought to think.

Instead, he watched the greatest occult threat on the continent, killing secular soldiers.

Schuler calmly wished, “Rifle,” and he gestured towards the driver, who was lifting up a Garand. The rifle dutifully launched out of the merc’s hands with enough force to break fingers, knocked down the remains of the windshield, and lazily flipped through the air to Schuler, who darted forward onto one foot and caught the weapon by its stock.

The driver shrieked, clutching mangled hands to his belly.

“Crush,” Schuler added, closing one eye and lowering his free hand like he was visually squishing the truck’s cabin beneath his palm. The vehicle’s frame groaned under sudden pressure, then snapped with a series of tremendous bangs. Unsupported, the roof collapsed like the weight of the truck itself was coming down on the cabin, and the driver screamed as the falling metal folded him over with all the lethal contortions that implied.

Phyllis touched the Baron’s elbow, staring at Schuler alongside him. She quoted from Apostasy in awe: “Lost in madness, a divine innocent can act and forget in the same breath.”

The Baron understood. That murder was a Diviner special. It was impossible to directly wish harm on a living soul, but it was technically allowed for a wish to accidentally hurt someone. Of course, the average person could never do the mental gymnastics necessary to crush a man inside a vehicle while forgetting their own intent to do so, but Schuler wasn’t an ordinary man.

The Zombie launched forward again. Bricks cracked again but didn’t fall.

Schuler handled the Garand swiftly, putting its stock to his shoulder. At that moment, a merc with a Thompson poked his weapon around the near edge of the panel truck.

“Collapse,” Schuler said with a tip of his head, and hundreds of pounds of brick wall suddenly slipped free and slumped against the side of the panel truck, burying the man with a single gush of red dust. As the rubble settled, the Diviner inspected the Garand’s safety, then the magazine. A smile danced across his face like he’d met an old friend. Then he rolled his neck to loosen it, swept the rifle around the room for targets, and spotted the Baron.

That smile upgraded to a friendly grin, and the barrel of the weapon tipped towards the rubble at his feet. “Baron!” he cried jovially. “Good to see you again!”

“Good to see you too,” the Baron muttered.

“Friends, friends!” Schuler yelled happily. “Don’t stand there! Run for your lives!”

“Of course,” the Baron said, as if he were receiving mere advice.

“See you later!” the Zombie called to Schuler.

“Later, devils!” the Diviner  cried back.

The Zombie threw himself into the wall one final time. Bricks crumbled beside the Baron, spilling the Zombie onto the alley road. “I’m through!” he yelled triumphantly.

Meister Schuler sloughed through the brick piled near the front of the truck, wishing aloud, “Strength, thunder, and neutral gears!” Something clunked in the vehicle’s machinery, and the tires settled, already rolling. Schuler planted one foot on the cattle-guard of the half-ton panel truck, and with only a little strain, he shoved the entire vehicle back through the gap in the wall. Then he shouted, and his voice was painfully loud, echoing out over the whole neighborhood. “Gentleman, prepare your souls! Today, you meet the gods!”

“Now!” Phyllis urged the Baron.

Schuler ran out after the rolling vehicle, and the twinned bonds of fear and fascination were finally broken. The Baron turned to look through the hole in the wall.

The Zombie was standing in the alley, peering along a limestone gravel path between the factory wall and the dusty brick facade of the neighboring cannery. He put his hat back on his head, then smiled at the Baron. “I see Malik’s car. Sea green windows. Instructions?”

“We don’t have time to chase him,” the Baron said.

The Zombie shrugged. “I can always find him later.”

The Baron leaned out through the hole in the wall, glancing towards the waterfront. It was clear all the way to the dockside pavement. He pulled back in, waving at the others clustering near him. “Everyone, out! Run to the waterfront! Single file, keep the Zombie at your back! Go, go, go!”

Barilla ran out first, holding the 1911 in hand. Martin went second, bearing his pilfered Garand, and the street gang rushed out on the guard’s heels. Phyllis went out directly behind them, and the Baron last, emerging into the sunshine on a cool spring day. The sounds of gunfire behind them were obscene, better suited to a World War than a half-empty wharf district.

The Baron glanced past the Zombie’s shoulder. At the front end of the alley there was a sedan, four doors opened, with men in suits prone beneath them and one laid out against the rear window, holding his rifle across the trunk lid and firing towards the front of the factory—presumably towards Meister Schuler’s battle.

The windshield and window glass were a pale sea-green. There weren’t any plates on the vehicle, but there were clean rectangles where they’d been recently removed.

The Zombie idled in front of the Baron, standing bow-legged and loose-armed to increase his surface area. That really was Malik’s vehicle, though the Soviet wasn’t visible. He must’ve moved to a more secure location, given the dangers of the firefight.

“It’s good that I’m taller,” the Zombie said casually.

“Yes,” the Baron agreed.

“Handsomer too. Didn’t you hear that they always shoot handsome men first?”

Even at a time like this, the Baron couldn’t help himself. “You’re not much of a comfort.”

“What?”

“I don’t need to be told I’ll die first.”

“You won’t die at all,” the Zombie insisted, jerking a thumb towards the back of the alley. “Time to move. I’ll walk on your heels, keep you in cover.”

The Baron turned away, putting the thunder of battle at his back. Phyllis was a few steps ahead, scowling at him. He’d been going slowly; they both knew it. Maybe it was a flaw in him, a bad habit learned over decades. The Baron was used to his own safety. Barilla, Martin, and the street gang were halfway down the alley, nearly at the empty steel dumpster that’d been pushed up against the factory’s wall. The Baron jogged to catch up to Phyllis, and the Zombie dutifully matched his pace. Dress shoes crushed old limestone gravel underfoot.

Barilla called back at them. “I know this area! At the corner, go left. Then we can duck into the cannery, hold up in the front office till the boys roll up.”

“Yes, sir,” said one of the gangsters.

“Got it boss!” Martin added with a little more verve.

Beyond the battle at their backs, they could hear another sound rising, a deep rumble like gunning engines. If those were the Anastasia gangsters, then their vehicles were about a minute out. “Backup is almost here!” Phyllis called.

As if responding to her voice, three CPUSA mercenaries jogged around the corner at the end of the alley, weapons in hand, expecting a clear path and finding two armed men with a column of people behind them.

For a long instant, everyone stopped—Baron d’Holbach included. The exchange of bullets, far behind them, was the only active conversation. Yet there was a common understanding in their own silence, a wordless desire to survive. Barilla and Martin were close to escaping the battlefield; the mercs were far from the meatgrinder of Schuler’s magic. Here, on the edge, everyone still lived. Still, a hand twitched on a merc’s Tommy. Barilla twitched too.

“Calm!” the Baron shouted, even as the Zombie darted around to stand in front of him. “Remain calm, and stay where you are!”

Hands jerked down, lowering barrels. Gunfire continued behind them, the birdsong of mass death, but everyone listened to the Baron’s cry.

“Clear the alley!” Phyllis hissed, waving the boys towards the factory wall.

The Baron followed her logic, moving towards the shadow of the dumpster. The riflemen at the front of the alley were still firing towards Schuler’s battlefield, and while it was unlikely for anyone to take a shot at the Baron, it wasn’t impossible. He ducked down with his back to the steel dumpster, waving Phyllis and the kids into place. The Zombie side-stepped to keep himself roughly between the new mercs and d’Holbach’s position.

Paranoid eyes followed their movements, but nobody complained. For the mercs, all that mattered were the men in front of them, the guns in their hands, and the invincible monster in the alley.

“I command the Zombie!” the Baron reminded them. “If you fight, he will kill you! Remain calm, and you will live! I can promise that!”

The Zombie let out a disappointed chuckle, then stage-whispered to the Baron, “I don’t like being anybody else’s shield, but…” A sigh. “You are my conscience. Orders?”

“Go forward, get their guns,” the Baron said quietly. “Then they can walk.”

If the Zombie had feelings, he would’ve been upset. These orders would require him to open some distance between himself and his friend. Nevertheless, if a firefight started in this alley, they might end up with shots coming from both sides, and the Zombie didn’t want to try busting through another wall, only to randomly fail when it mattered most.

He had to follow through. He marched forward in a straight line, approaching the gangsters and the mercs where they all stood, facing each other down in terrified silence. One errant twitch, and both sides might open fire with nowhere to run. The Zombie expected none of them to remain calm, but he trusted in their shared fear of death.

Then he passed between Barilla and Martin, and he stood in front of them, smiling genially. “Mercenaries.” He tipped the brim of his bowler towards them. “Your lives will cost you two things. First, I need to know if there are any more of your men along the waterfront.”

“Get them to surrender too,” Barilla whispered behind him.

He held up a hand for silence. Barilla let out a small snort of frustration but didn’t speak further. Then the Zombie spoke calmly to the mercenaries: “Second, I need your guns. Then you may go where you like, so long as it’s away from my people.”

One of the mercs with a Tommy glanced sidelong at his peers. “Can we talk first? Come to, uh, an understanding?”

The Zombie grinned. “About what? There’s no negotiation.”

“There’s conditions on our services,” the merc said softly. “Our families.”

“Christ!” Barilla stepped forward, pushing his chest out and arraying himself beside the Zombie. He waved the 1911 around vaguely, not quite at the mercs but with a degree of carelessness that ratcheted up everyone’s nerves. “You comply, or you die. Simple!”

The Zombie put out a hand in front of Barilla. “Please, Barilla—”

“Lower your hand, freak.”

“I almost never say this, but your life matters—”

“Lower it!”

The Zombie lowered his hand but didn’t stop speaking. “Stand behind me. These men are afraid, and I am cover.”

“No, you’re listening to them, and they’re wasting time.” Barilla waved the pistol past them like he was swatting away flies. “They need to surrender now.”

There was a beep on all the radios in the alley. One in the Baron’s hands. Three on the hips of these mercenaries. Malik’s voice emerged, quavering but forceful. “All bands emergency broadcast. Spotters place Cosa Nostra backup at thirty seconds, so these will be your final orders. Kill everyone but Baron d’Holbach and the Zombie, or die trying. If anyone survives a lost battle, then I guarantee the complete ruin of their families. It’s victory or death—these are your only options. Good hunting, comrades. Over and out.”

The Zombie’s smile fell away. The mercenaries stared back at his impassive face. Malik had put an impossible amount of pressure on them. Their survival instincts were fighting against their love for their families. In their hearts, death was becoming a gift to their wives. To their children. Yet the Zombie was truly terrifying; he’d carved a bloody lesson only minutes ago, and transmitted by screams, it’d taken hold in their hearts. They hesitated in front of him.

“Put down your guns!” Barilla shouted at the mercs, raising his pistol.

The merc with the Tommy winced, and in that single motion, the Zombie knew that negotiations had failed. Barilla’s machismo had ruined them. “Don’t, gods damn it!” the Zombie barked, even as the merc raised his weapon and made his final, miserable choice.

A finger on the trigger; thunder between brick walls. Bullets danced across the Zombie’s chest as he lunged forward, throwing ricochets around the alley—one bullet flicked right into Barilla’s temple, knocking him a half-inch sideways—and the Zombie’s punch landed with sledgehammer force, knocking the merc’s head back hard enough to instantly break his neck and throw him off his feet. Two bodies thudded on the gravel at once.

The other mercs turned tail, sprinting out of the alley because they were about to die. The Zombie glanced back towards the Baron, past the fallen Barilla, beyond a shocked Martin and a gaggle of horrified women and children.

“After me!” he roared.

Then he sprinted as swiftly as death itself, giving chase to his enemies.

Heedless of any possible threat at the front of the factory, the Baron burst up and into a sprint, shouting loudly, “Run!”

Phyllis and the children leapt up after him, following down the alley.

Ahead, Barilla was as good as dead. Muscles were seizing; blood was spurting out of the hole in the side of his skull, leaving spattered lines across the white gravel. Likely, he was unaware of how he’d died, only feeling that his body had suddenly lost control, dragging him down into darkness.

Martin was staring down at his boss, dumbstruck. He’d failed to protect him.

The Baron slapped the guard on the shoulder as he passed, yelling again, “Run!”

Martin threw himself into motion, following orders.

The Baron wished that the Zombie could clear the way for their escape, but no amount of prestige could fill that desire. Only chance and violence could change what laid ahead.

The Zombie sprinted up a tarry ramp onto pavement and shot out of the alley, angling to the right. The waterfront spread open before him, breezy and bright. A dockside road bordered itself with the debris of dying waterside industries, blue skies swept over dark water, and gulls circled in flight. Parked in the middle of it all, the enemy readied for a final battle. Three CPUSA vehicles bristled with mercenaries, all standing in open doors while loading firearms.

The two running mercs were approaching a sedan, screaming, “Zombie! Zombie!” The car’s engine roared into life, and the Zombie accelerated, grinding away shoe soles as he propelled himself across the pavement like a reckless driver. His hat flew loose, forgotten. He jumped, throwing his body into the air and twisting around ballistically, and he struck the hood of the revving car with his spine in poor form.

By the will of the gods, he became a meteor plunging into a sea of shrapnel. Metal collapsed beneath him, crushing the entire front of the vehicle into itself, only to have the material bounce back and explode up and around him like someone splashing a gelatin dessert with a baseball bat. The roaring engine flew to pieces, tossing rods and pistons like shotgun slugs. The running mercs went down, swept over by shrapnel.

The Zombie’s momentum had been multiplied many times over, expressed through the evacuation of ripping, exploding metal. By the time he came to a stop, the remnants of the engine block, sputtering and smoking, were thrusting through the dashboard, crushing the driver in his seat. A tire—freed in the impact—rolled past the Zombie’s view, just beyond a man-wide trench of metal and smoke. One vehicle of three, incapacitated.

He struck the engine block with his elbows, bouncing up and out. A tattered sleeve snagged on something, tearing off cleanly, and he was stumbling onto his feet, coming out of the wreckage of his landing. Mercs were scattering in every direction like cockroaches in the light; some were already opening fire, thudding rounds through the Zombie’s clothes.

The Zombie ignored them for the span of a victim’s racing heartbeat. Two blocks down, a pair of trucks roared out of a distant alley and onto the waterfront road. Half dozen people were loaded up in each bed. At the sight of armed mercs, they lifted weapons and leaned out, two vehicles suddenly bristling with firearms. A second later, the Zombie recognized dock workers, laborers, and other criminal elements. The Anastasia crew was rolling in to make war.

The Zombie chose to help. He turned away and sprinted towards the next CPUSA vehicle, the next merc that wasn’t already fleeing for safety. A man screamed, firing uselessly as the Zombie tackled him into the side of a panel truck, crushing all of the man’s ribs at once. So satisfying. The Zombie would murder his enemies, again and again, until there were none.

Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach burst out of the alley himself, glancing right and seeing the wreckage of a vehicle and the Zombie colliding with another man, crushing him to death against a panel truck; then immediately, the Baron cut left, heading across the cannery’s facade towards the open warehouse doors that Barilla had mentioned earlier.

Phyllis, Martin, and the kids hesitated when he changed directions, but they quickly adjusted and followed him out. Gunfire blindly urged them forward, heedless of anything but a desperate need to reach the safety of cover.

Ahead, two trucks bristled with dock workers holding Tommy guns, Berettas, and revolvers. Several barrels turned to face them. The Baron threw up his hands and waved, even as he darted for the cover of the cannery’s open warehouse doors.

Martin was their saving grace. He saw the oncoming vehicles and stepped out further, throwing down his Garand and roaring, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! Women and children!”

The children hesitated, unsure if they should follow Phyllis or join Martin in the road. The guard noticed a fraction of a second later. “Get to cover!” he roared to the pausing gangsters. “With Phyllis! Get out of the road!”

 The Baron paused just inside the cannery doors, waving Phyllis and the children in. Outside, both vehicles shot past Martin, mafioso looking grim as they prepared to deploy at the back of the factory. The battle was entering its final, most violent stage.

There was a sound like someone blowing up a bomb some distance away. Martin flinched, shouting, “Mother of Christ!” Then he charged for the safety of the cannery.

“What happened?” the Baron yelled.

“They dynamited the Zombie?” Martin reported, unsure of whatever he’d seen. He stumbled to a stop next to Phyllis, breathing heavily. “Jesus. He really is invincible.”

“He is,” the Baron said.

Out on the waterfront, the Anastasia crew opened fire. It was one long burst—not the sound of a battlefield, but of a firing squad, gunning down targets for five long seconds.

Silence followed. No mercs were shooting back.

A couple of shots pierced the silence like questions.

“I’m with you!” roared the Zombie some distance away, answering them.

No further shots followed on this side of the block, but the sounds of the firefight on the far side were intensifying.

“What’s happening out there?” Phyllis asked the Baron, just a few feet further into the shadows of the cannery warehouse. He turned to face her, standing protectively in front of a whimpering pile of street gangsters, leaning in against the cannery wall. Martin was amongst them, hugging the youngest boy against his chest and whispering something comforting.

“Everyone is dying,” the Baron answered truthfully.

“Except for us,” Phyllis noted.

“Yes. Mostly thanks to the Zombie.”

An instant later, said Zombie sprinted into view outside the cannery, one sleeve of his dress shirt missing from the shoulder down. He fell over on purpose, flipped over once in a tumble of limbs, and landed on his ass, laughing. “What a day!”

The Baron frowned at him. This wasn’t the time for cheer.

“How can you celebrate? Barilla is dead!” Phyllis shouted, treating the Zombie’s gaiety like he was embarrassing himself at a funeral.

“Yes, yes he is!” the Zombie roared with mirth. “I told him to get back!”

“What?” Phyllis gawked. “What does that mean?”

The Zombie scrambled up onto his feet, passing beneath the shadow of the cannery to join them in cover. “I told him to stay behind me! He chose otherwise. That’s his fault!”

Phyllis squinted up at the tall man. “Don’t you care?”

“Not really?” The Zombie shrugged. “I cared a little when I could still save him. Now? Not so much.”

She sighed and faced the Baron instead, dismissing the madman for a slighter saner figure. “Earlier, you told me you’d tell me something about Barilla’s son. Is it the Cat? Does he have it?” Worry was etched into the folds of her face. Gray hairs were beginning to unwind from her beehive hairdo, but she didn’t look out of control or disheveled. She only looked pissed.

The Baron grunted. He’d promised to tell her if they survived, and now that Barilla was dead, they might need her help—especially if she knew where Barilla’s son lived. He waved her closer, and after a long moment, she sighed and stepped into his personal space.

The Baron leaned forward and whispered into her ear, “Yes, he has it.”

She couldn’t help but shout, “That ignorant asshole!”

The Baron agreed, but he didn’t say that out loud. He didn’t know Barilla well enough to feel comfortable badmouthing the recently deceased. Instead, he gave the conclusion. “You need to lead us to him as soon as possible. The fate of the free world depends on it.”

Phyllis closed her eyes in frustration. “Apostate, fuckin’ save me.”

Author’s Note:

Apostate, save us all. We’ve reached the end of some truly hectic violence, but the case beckons us forward.

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

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July 4, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warning.

“Baron!” Barilla called shakily, kneeling alongside his child soldier.

The Baron turned to face him. What a sad figure he carved, clutching his revolver for safety. He wasn’t even injured. At least Martin, that meat slab of a man, had put an arm behind Stubs’ shoulders, offering human comfort and a mote of rest.

It struck d’Holbach that if he hadn’t grabbed the dock boss and thrown him forward, Barilla might’ve hesitated until the sniper ventilated him, a second victim.

Tears were already on Barilla’s cheeks. “It’s Stubs, they shot Stubs!”

“I’m sorry,” the Baron answered, and it was an honest apology. He’d wanted to escape without casualties. Now, blood pulsed out of Stubs’ wound with the regularity of a short clock, running down the last minutes at the end of a short life.

“Can you lay hands on him?” Barilla asked, nearly begging.

“Not with my current prestige,” the Baron replied, stepping further into the safety of the shadows. He held the Zombie’s hat at his waistline, bowing his own head. “I’m truly sorry.”

The boss fixed him with an indignant glare. “What do you mean, you’re sorry? You promised healing for my son, didn’t you?”

“When I had more prestige, yes—”

“He’s shot!” Barilla yelled, as if raising his voice could change the facts of the matter, the little quirks of history and the costs of magic that were conspiring to seal this young man’s fate.

Phyllis swept around from where she was comforting one of the younger boys, knelt by her boss, and grabbed his upper arm with her thin fingers. “He can’t help!” she said sharply, gritting her teeth with barely restrained frustration. “Stop yelling!”

“Stay calm,” Martin whispered to Stubs, pulling him in a little closer.

Barilla twitched like he’d been slapped, staring into her eyes. “Phyllis?”

“Listen to me!” She shook her boss’s arm once, barely shifting his mass. “We need to defend ourselves! Either we get out, or the Anastasia boys bail us out. Either way, you don’t help Stubs by yelling at the Baron. Do you understand me?”

“Yeah,” Barilla said breathily.

“Good.” She let go of him, standing up. “Everyone, keep an eye on the inside doors! I don’t want anyone coming in here without a gun barking an answer!”

Barilla nodded, catching onto her meaning and rising up himself. “Arm up, boys! You heard the woman! Anyone comes through a door, we drive ‘em back!”

His gang echoed his command with a half-hearted cry of bravery, all while retreating to the darkest, safest corner of this room. The Baron slouched after them with Phyllis at his side, watching as this would-be Red Hook gang armed itself at Barilla’s command.

One member was pulling out loose .22 cartridges from his pants pocket, fumbling, dropping them on the floor. He had a hollow aerial antenna shoved through a rubber golf handle for a barrel. The round was jammed into the hole, set to be fired by a strip of medical tubing punctured by a screw. The other boys saw what he was doing and scrambled to pick up the fallen rounds for themselves. Zip guns of all shapes and sizes were unfolded and loaded. Tubes ripped out of old coffee percolators were just the right size for a barrel. Soft chunks of pine, normally used for whittling, were already shaped into crude handles with clothespin triggers.

“Don’t fire unless you have to,” the Baron commanded them. What he really wanted to say was, don’t use zip guns, but there wasn’t much of a choice here. Barilla was waiting for his youngest soldiers to arm themselves in the approved way. Despite supporting and exploiting youth gangs, the Cosa Nostra never supplied them with real guns. Illegal firearms were too expensive to waste on scads of volatile children who’d rarely pay the mob back.

“We’re ready,” Barilla said, when the last and youngest boy had armed himself.

The Zombie turned away from the open window, coming over to meet them in the corner. He glanced over the armed children, scowled for an instant, and then met his friend’s questioning eyes.

The Baron’s raised eyebrow was a silent question: see anything out there?

The Zombie answered promptly, “It’s a powder keg. I think Schuler is crawling on his belly behind a row of steel mailboxes, dragging his ass like a slug. Gutshot—for now.”

“How do you know?” Phyllis asked, huddling in closer to speak with them.

The Zombie glanced back towards the shattered window. “Fresh blood was smeared across twenty feet of sidewalk. I don’t know why he hasn’t healed himself already.”

“He’s a madman,” the Baron said plainly. There was no easier answer.

“Gods,” Phyllis muttered.

“Where’s he going?” the Baron asked, clutching the Zombie’s hat at his waistline.

The invincible man took a deep breath—this time for the emotional expression of it. “I think he’s heading for the panel truck parked about a block away from here.”

“Panel truck? How big?”

“A half-ton Chevy. The kind you’d use to carry people.”

“Any other signs of the enemy?” the Baron asked.

A curt nod. “There’s at least ten men on that side alone, twitching for a target. Shouldn’t be long till the whole thing explodes.”

“How do you know?” Phyllis asked him.

“It’s been loud,” the Zombie said plainly. “They need to finish up here before anyone arrives. My guess is they’re here to kill everyone.”

“But why?” Phyllis asked, still struggling to fully understand.

The Zombie shrugged. He couldn’t provide the obvious answer, if only because it’d give away the truth of the whole scenario in front of many witnesses. If someone had swallowed the Cat, the easiest way to discover its location was to shoot its bearer and see that they survived. Everyone else could just die, conveniently eliminating all other witnesses.

“At least they’re afraid of you, right?” Phyllis asked the Zombie.

He smirked but didn’t answer the question.

“Are you telling me they’re not?” she pressed. “But you have the Pact! They should be terrified!”

“I know,” the Zombie said softly. “I’ll just have to be more terrifying.”

She paused, frowning doubtfully. After a second, her mind seemed to change along with her expression. Eyes opened wider in fearful recognition. “You really mean that?”

“He does,” the Baron whispered. “Zombie, change of plans. We can’t move our casualties, so I’ll need you to secure the building. Assume there are enemies inside with us.” A quick flick of the Zombie’s hat indicated the rooms toward the waterfront, including the quadrant of the building they’d originally avoided because of an open garage door. “Sweep the place, close any open doors, and make an example or two.”

“An example,” Phyllis whispered, scowling. “You mean to be cruel.”

The Baron rubbed his bald head with a sweaty palm. “I hate it, but it might be the only way these boys make it out alive. Unless you have a better idea, because I’ll entertain it.”

“It’s not my choice,” Phyllis whispered. “I’m not invincible.”

The Zombie let a sly smile spread across his face. He reached into a pocket and removed the penny knife, unfolding it and showing Phyllis the cheap blade. “If it’ll make you happy, I can make an example or two without making it too painful. How’s that sound?”

Phyllis recoiled the tiniest iota. “I’m not making that decision.”

The Zombie laughed softly, truly joyful. “Then I’ll choose it for myself. It’ll hurt, and then it won’t. A kind murder.” He gestured with the knife, splitting their little huddle apart, and he marched for the back of the building, laughing at his own words. “So very, very kind!”

The soulless and invincible man stalked towards the back of the room, aware of the Baron’s gaze resting on his shoulders. He was proud of himself; the most moral, godless man alive was letting him off the leash, approving of his vanity and power.

This diminutive, fragile knife would retrace the lines of his legend, carving men into corpses, and each one would become a unique word in a primeval language. It was a method of communication, more compelling than ephemeral words of breath and tongue. To predators, it was a crimson triumph. To their prey, it was a single word. Run.

Each interior wall had two sets of swinging doors, set some distance apart. He chose the doors on the left, closer to the outer wall, angling to cut off any escape. He couldn’t make an easy example out of someone who died alone in an alley, and after a child had caught a bullet with a kidney, the Zombie was starving for some public vengeance.

He stopped at the final moment, peering through the gap between the swinging doors. One man was standing near the open garage door, waving someone in. He was late 30s, white with buzzed brown hair, holding a pitted Garand rifle and wearing old WW2 fatigues—sensible, since the combat uniform was all wool. Ex-soldiers, American, which jarred with the Zombie’s expectations. Weren’t these Soviet-aligned mercenaries?

The man coming inside stopped to whisper to his colleague. This one was in his forties, black and grey hair, holding an M3A1 submachinegun—a Grease Gun.

Two people were guaranteed indoors now. Almost certainly three. The Zombie raised two fingers back towards the Baron, then raised a third and waggled his hand for uncertainty. No need to check if the Baron understood. Soon, there’d be far, far fewer people.

The Zombie pushed shoulder-first through the swinging doors, letting them close across his trailing arm before catching them shut behind his back.

Two mercs snapped to attention, vaguely pointing their weapons. A third merc was in fact on the right side of the room, holding an M1 Thompson SMG and peering through the doors that they’d avoided only minutes before. So three examples to make—Garand, Grease Gun, and Thompson.

“Gentlemen,” the Zombie said warmly, brandishing the penny knife.

Thompson swept around, keeping his barrel towards the ground.

The man with the Garand suddenly flinched. Did he know?

Grease Gun already had the dust cover flipped up—effectively, the safety was off. He rushed to finger-cock the bolt.

The Zombie smiled broadly and took big, friendly strides into the middle of the room, arms wide as if he intended to hug an old, dear friend. “I’m glad to see you!”

Grease Gun crammed the wire stock against his shoulder and shouted, “Get on the ground!” Ironsights wavered for only a moment as he took aim, center of mass.

“Wait!” Thompson yelled.

The Zombie strode towards Grease Gun, staring down the barrel. “Three guesses who I am—” he began.

Grease Gun pulled the trigger for almost a full second. The first shot went low, tearing into the belly of the Zombie’s shirt. The next one jumped high, ricocheting off his sternum. Then the soldier had control, and the last five shots all grouped tightly on the Zombie’s chest, peppering him. Flecks of wool and cotton fluttered like confetti.

Most rounds had shattered or ricocheted, but one came to a stop and rolled off the Zombie’s chest. He caught it with his spare hand and paused, holding up the pristine bullet to the daylight streaming in through the garage door. The echoes of gunfire faded into horrible silence. Three sets of eyes stared at that tiny piece of proof.

The Zombie smiled, flicking the bullet away, and raised the knife in a hammer grip. “That’s one guess,” he declared. Then he rushed Grease Gun.

The merc with the Garand tried to shout something, but Grease Gun guessed again with a second salvo, holding down the trigger until the Zombie rammed into him bodily, knocking the SMG loose at the same moment that he slashed the side of the man’s neck with the penny knife. It felt fluid, the controlled stroke of an artist painting his masterpiece in the middle of a car crash. Flesh parted, and a bright merry jet of arterial red shot through the sunlight. Grease Gun stumbled backwards, howling in terror like an animal unleashed, spinning around and already bolting for safety, even as another two heartbeats of blood jetted out in smooth flows.

“That’s two!” the Zombie yelled, turning away from an already dead man. Grease Gun blacked out from immediate blood loss and collapsed behind him, a tumble of limbs.

Thompson was yelling into a walkie-talkie, “Zombie in the back!”

Garand sprinted for the door past Thompson, fleeing deeper into the building. Dangerous, but a rifle wasn’t an SMG.

The Zombie charged Thompson, who smashed his radio into the floor, dropped his weapon, and raised his hands just before the Zombie drove the small knife into his chest, right into his heart. One last spasm of muscle, felt through the handle. Then a wet gasp of surprise.

“I surrender,” Thompson croaked. Last breath. Last words.

“Too late.” The Zombie gripped the wooden handle and turned away from the man, yanking up like he wanted to pitch the knife overhand. For a mortal, this would’ve torn the handle out of his grip or hyperextended his shoulder. For the Zombie, all possible injuries were prevented by generating immense forces. Tight in his grip, the blade jumped explosively upwards, slashing through lung and heart until the leading edge bit into a rib, literally jerking Thompson a half inch up while snapping the blade off at the handle.

The merc collapsed backwards onto the floor, gurgling and thrashing as blood poured from his new chest wound like a tapped maple tree. Would-be killers of children deserved no less, and Garand was still in the building. One last threat.

The Zombie threw the knife handle aside and sprinted past Thompson, already running faster than most cars on city streets. When he hit the swinging doors, one flung open with a thunderous bang, and the other tore off its hinges with a calamitous roar of metal screws tearing loose. Debris tumbled ahead of his charge, a tremendous spectacle, but he’d made the wrong choice. The room was empty, and a set of doors on the right were swinging closed.

Garand was circling through the building, but the Zombie was moving too fast to turn. He gave up, going limp, and slammed belly first into one of the old factory tables, folding over the edge before stopping dead without any transfer of momentum. Good enough.

“Baron!” the Zombie bellowed, all the warning he had time to give.

Bedlam and a shout were all that was needed.

The Baron took a knee and waved the Zombie’s bowler like a commander’s flag, indicating the doors they’d entered through. “Over there!”

Like a flock of birds taking flight, Martin ducked next, then Phyllis. Barilla and his street gang knelt last, bringing up their weapons in quivering hands.

The tables between them and the far doors wouldn’t provide any real cover, but even a moment of obfuscation might save them, the Baron’s life, and the lives of many more.

A mercenary in military fatigues shoved through the swinging doors, already aiming his Garand. He twitched at the sudden sight of a line of kneeling men, then pulled the rifle towards a target and pulled the trigger. A round bit into wood, spraying lacquered splinters. 

Barilla answered with a crack of his revolver, a powerful shot flying wide left of the merc’s head. Chips of brick scattered, while the merc made a wish.

“Jammed!” he roared, freezing the cylinder of Barilla’s revolver in place, even as the mob boss still pulled the revolver’s trigger twice more, uselessly.

“Miss!” the Baron wished, not for his sake but Barilla’s. It was only a second of blessed protection, but even as the word was shouted, Garand fired again, blowing a hole into the brick just past the dock boss. A little prestige drained away; it’d only been a slight modification of trajectory, practically a coincidence, but it’d been a miracle all the same.

Six zip-guns went off like a string of firecrackers; two bullets punctured the merc, once in the arm, once in the stomach. There was screaming from both kids and men. One kid dropped his wooden handle; the tips of his fingers on his left hand were gone. The Garand rifle struck the floor a moment later—the merc’s left arm had fallen slack, but he wasn’t stopped. Riding a wave of adrenaline, he pulled a 1911 from a quick-release holster, fired twice while trying to account for the tables, hit the floor, then a street gangster’s throat.

Then the door burst open behind him, and the Zombie tackled him bodily onto the floor, slamming him into the concrete. The 1911 skittered across the concrete; the merc yelped.

The Baron saw an opportunity, unexpected but valuable. “Keep him alive!” he ordered.

The Zombie rolled off the fallen man and sprung to his feet with marionette strength—twitching strangely, launching his body up and around with divine forces, protecting fingers and ankles from twisting and bending till they broke. He kicked the Garand across the floor towards Martin and picked up the dropped 1911. A momentary glance was spared for the fallen mercenary. The merc was rolling over onto his back, holding both hands over his gut wound and glaring daggers at the Zombie.

“He’s alive!” the Zombie called cheerily. “For now!”

Martin scooped up the rifle, just inches away from the long stretches of sunlight cast by the windows, and he darted back, fearful of who might spot him through the gap.

Two of the kids were crouching over their collapsing brother. Phyllis joined them, trying to assert some adult sanity onto tragedy. The others were shushing the teen with freshly ruined fingers, saying that he’d be just like Stubs, and they all loved Stubs. Stubs who was still dying against the wall, shivering with a hand clutching at his kidney.

The Baron didn’t hesitate. “Zombie! Grab his ankles. Drag him past the windows.”

The Zombie snapped his fingers and saluted. The 1911 was carefully tucked into his belt; everything else was merely a matter of strength. The groaning mercenary slid with his shoulders against the floor, until he was pulled into the safety of the shadows and the glaring attention of Baron d’Holbach. The Zombie dropped his legs with a thud of boots. The mercenary twitched miserably, teeth-gritted. The pain must be growing.

“Pistol?” the invincible man asked the crowd, offering the merc’s 1911.

Barilla holstered his revolver and took the weapon gladly.

“I’m going to shut the garage door,” the Zombie said.

The Baron waved him off with his hat, a silent agreement. Then he knelt alongside the wounded man and stripped his radio. It was intact. “You can’t dodge and live,” he told the wounded man, “and I know your friends won’t take you back. Just this morning, they shot one of you after he surrendered to us. So if you want to live, you’ll follow my orders.”

The merc muttered, “Radio serial bullshit.”

“What?” the Baron asked.

“He had a family.” The merc’s eyes closed, wincing. “That’s all.”

That was a curious assertion, more personal than expected. “You know who got shot?”

“Yeah, he was shot because he had a family.” The merc coughed. “It was a favor. Dead men get funerals. Losers get outed as Commies.”

Martin was standing by them, watching the doors alertly. He glanced at the merc but didn’t see a man, just a dying enemy. The Baron had seen soldiers and murderers with that empty expression. “Fuckin reds,” he muttered.

As Commies. The truth began to assemble itself in the Baron’s mind. “Your employers are blackmailing you?” he asked.

“Of course,” the merc replied. “They paid us to fight Pinkertons in the 40s. They have our names, receipts, records. We were muscle for the CPUSA.”

“You’re the dregs of the Communist Party,” the Baron concluded, hearing all his suspicions confirmed in five letters. CPUSA. Until today, they were an entirely unknown occult resource. Now, the Baron began to grasp the scale of the enemy arrayed against them.

The garage door in the other room clattered on its rails, shutting.

The merc laughed, a hacking sound. “It’s enough to ruin lives.” He frowned. ”Who’d want to hire the wife of a Communist? Who’d hire his son? Better dead.”

Before the Foley Square Trials in 1949, the Communist Party USA had been a significant secular power in America—mixing organized crime, anti-war movements, and unionizing labor under one crimson banner. Like all radical organizations, they’d collected a goon squad of hitmen and militia members, some of them soldiers back from the war, others covertly trained by the KGB. Whether or not they’d been part of a true fifth column was unknown, but in criminal circles they were widely known for opposing union-busters and government plants.

In another context, they might’ve been heroes for the working man. Here and now, they were utterly compromised, dying for the sake of families that’d be better off without them.

“Are you working for Malik?” the Baron asked.

“Just some Russian,” the merc said. “They’re all fucking insane.”

“Stop chewing the fat,” Barilla said bitterly.

“We need to interrogate—”

“He’s a fucking dog!” Barilla shouted. When the Baron failed to snap back, he seemed surprised by his own anger, as if he was offended because nobody fought with him. “Nothing to say, you piece of shit?” It was hard to tell if he was talking to the Baron or the mercenary.

“They shot a child,” the Baron replied, “so, yes, I’m pissed too.”

The Zombie shouldered through the doors. “Shut and locked!” His eyes darted around the room, and all semblances of a smile died on his face. “How’s the kid-killer?”

The Baron waved him over. “They’re CPUSA goons. Suicidal, more or less.”

“Bobby is dead,” Phyllis declared, standing up from the kid who was shot in the neck.

“Fuck!” Barilla checked the safety on the 1911.

“Want me to kill him?” the Zombie asked the Baron.

The Baron’s impulse was to say yes; he’d watched the shooting. But his mind overruled his heart. “Stay your hand. We can use him.”

“Fuck this!” Barilla said, aiming the weapon.

“Put that down!” the Baron shouted at Barilla. “We need him!”

“He’s dead!” Barilla shouted, nevertheless lowering the pistol.

“Boss!” Stubs called to Barilla. The sorrow in that voice was so sharp, so desperate that every adult in the room—even the Zombie—turned to face it. “I want to go, Boss.”

Barilla’s anger was snuffed. “Stubs, buddy, I’m sorry.”

“I’m cold,” Stubs said bitterly. “Tired.” His hands were clenched over his kidney wound, but there was still blood seeping from the ragged hole. At a glance, his missing fingers appeared like a fresh amputation. “I want to see a doctor.”

“A doctor can’t help,” Phyllis said sadly.

“I mean a surgeon,” Stubs muttered. “At the hospital.”

“How?” the Baron asked, jumping on this point before Barilla or anyone else could complicate the reality. “You want to surrender?”

Stubs nodded rapidly. “Just me, yeah. Only me.”

Shit. The last minutes had been dominated by chaos. From the first gunshots until Stubs’ last, sad words, too many people had been talking at once. Emotions were running high—blood inflamed both fear and rage—but the word surrender was stronger still. It dropped the dead weight of gloom across the gangsters.

For the first time, they seemed to notice that they were in a factory line, crouched in the shadows. Long ago, sawdust had been poured out and swept away, leaving oily crusts of it in the corners, browning and pushed against the brick. A flattened cardboard box laid under a table. Dust had traced their motions, their violence. Blood smelled like it was everywhere, appeared like it was on everything. So bright and arresting, the thinnest layer implied landscapes of gore and injury, drowning beneath sanguine seas.

Outside the shattered windows, a spring wind blew half-heartedly. Gulls could be heard by the distant water. Whenever a kiss of outside air passed over them, it carried the chalky stench of limestone gravel roads.

It didn’t seem like a warzone. It wasn’t the kind of place where a boy like Stubs, hardly a man, should have to surrender to save his life. Yet unbidden, the Baron had offered it, and Stubs had accepted the suggestion. There was no other way out, at least for Stubs. Either he surrendered or he died. He was fatally wounded and couldn’t possibly run.

“Are you sure?” Phyllis asked Stubs.

“I want to live,” Stubs said.

“Then you have to try,” Phyllis replied. She squinted at the Baron. “Any ideas?”

The Baron was holding the merc’s walkie-talkie in one hand, the Zombie’s hat in the other. These were his only tools, and he’d have to use them both. He pointed the stubby radio antenna at the wounded merc. “Is this tuned in?”

The merc closed his eyes. “Press to send.”

The Baron held his thumb over the button. He needed to tell the CPUSA mercs that Stubs wanted to surrender, but if the walkie-talkies were part of a tightly-controlled radio network, they would only receive extremely important traffic. By keeping the radios a secret from the enemy, the Baron might learn something valuable, something that might save multiple lives. He needed a way to send a message without communicating their casualties in the factory. Only one person in this room could really manage that.

He kneeled by the merc’s head. “I need you to say something on the radio. I want you to tell your boss that a kid they shot wants to surrender.”

“You think you can trust him?” Phyllis asked.

The Zombie fielded that question. “Nothing to lose by trying.”

The merc grimaced. “I can’t report a surrender.”

“Is it no quarter then?” the Baron asked.

“No, we just can’t use the radio like that. Everything is code or shorthand. They didn’t give us a word for surrender.”

“What are the radios for then?” the Baron asked.

“Orders and intel.”

Stubs reached up with a hand, implicitly asking for someone, anyone to help him rise. “Please. I’ll just go out the door then. I’ve got to try. Got to.”

The Zombie was the only one unafraid of harming Stubs; he was the first to respond to that gesture of desire. Very carefully, he lowered his arm, letting Stubs grab hold of the cloth around his wrist. Then together, they rose. Once Stubs had his feet under him, legs shaking, he looked back to the Baron. “Front door?”

The Baron frowned. “Can you get him past the windows?”

The Zombie nodded curtly.

“Take him then,” the Baron agreed, waving the bowler towards the door. “Open it.”

“Are you sure?” Phyllis asked loudly.

Stubs spoke up, voice shuddering like his limbs. “I die here, out there, or I live. Please.”

“He’s sure,” the Zombie said. “He gets to choose.”

Phyllis exchanged glances with Barilla, Martin, and then the Baron. Every adult in the room came to a silent agreement that this tragedy had no solution; that a desperate prayer, traced in footsteps through a sniper’s line of fire, was the only way forward for Stubs.

The Zombie supported the young man, standing to his right, shielding his skinny frame from the windows. “Come on,” he urged. Together, they hobbled; twice, Stubs’ legs tried to give up, but he only sagged onto the strength of an invincible arm. The Zombie walked like Stubs’ was a paper thin thing, resting on a surface as steady and patient as stone.

Then they reached the front door, and the Zombie quickly leaned Stubs’ against the wall. “Keys?” he called.

Martin reached into his pockets and pitched his keyring across the space. The Zombie snatched them like a frog picking an insect from the air, then knelt before the door and unlocked the padlock. Chains rattled aside, and the door opened. Light and air flooded over the Zombie’s form, and he stood, facing the young man’s precipice. Out there, the light.

The Zombie peered out towards the sniper positions, towards where Schuler must still be crawling. No signs of motion. All waiting for the final act. If the Baron had asked to walk this path, the Zombie would’ve refused to open the door. But for Stubs, death was omnipresent, both in here and out there. At least somewhere in that brilliant sunlight, there might be a ray of hope, hiding.

He turned back towards the young man, letting the mechanisms of the body feel sympathy for the dying child. “Stubs,” he said kindly. “Before you walk out, I need to know that you know what’s out there.”

Stubs was holding onto his wound, leaning against the brick wall. “Know what?”

The Zombie glanced meaningfully towards the world outside. “They’ve shot men all morning. Shot each other. If you’re afraid, you can still die on the floor. With friends.”

“I don’t want to,” Stubs replied.

“So you’re gambling on another bullet, hoping for mercy?”

Stubs nodded tightly. “Yes.”

The Zombie stepped back, gesturing at the path to the sidewalk. “Then go. Be brave, kid. This ends on your terms, or it keeps going on theirs.”

Stubs pushed off the wall, stepping out into the light of day. He paused there, squinting at the painfully bright sky. “I am brave,” he said. Maybe he didn’t believe it, but there was a strength in his voice. He pulled his hands away from the wound, unbuttoned his white dress shirt with his good fingers, and gingerly peeled the clotted cloth away from his matted body hair.

“Do you want help?” the Zombie asked.

“No.” Stubs finished removing his shirt by pulling the left sleeve inside out. He grabbed ahold of the blood-soaked mass in his good hand, letting the rest of the shirt hang from his fist like a white flag. His wound was a rough pit in his gut, weeping blood. Then he raised his arm, and without a final word, he marched out into the sun and started waving towards the snipers that’d already killed him.

There was a click and a voice on the walkie-talkie. “Common vehicle spotted.”

The Zombie glanced back into the dim safety of the factory.

The Baron held the radio near the merc. “Translate,” he ordered.

“That’s a non-essential civilian,” the merc explained.

The Zombie looked back outside. The radio channel would be open to anyone scanning the waves. Their lingo disguised their intentions against the average eavesdropper.

“I give up!” Stubs shouted towards the street ahead. “I give up!”

The radio crackled. “Common vehicle, in the lane. Over.”

“Someone has him in their line of fire,” the merc said.

“He’s not a threat,” the Baron said.

The Zombie had seen too many battlefields to expect mercy now. He’d already raged once about the unfairness of Stubs’ impending death. Surely, all those snipers could see him again, staring out at them. If they shot Stubs again, there’d be no need to scream a second time. In the Zombie’s heart, he’d simply schedule their deaths in due time.

Even if it took him years, he’d find them and kill them all.

Another voice on the radio: “Requesting permit to invent. Over.”

A third voice, “Affirmative. Permit issued. Over.”

“The common vehicle wants to… park. Do we open our lot?”

“Traffic administration will decide. Over.”

“Copy, traffic admin, the common vehicle is in limbo. Over.”

Through the radio’s static, most of the voices sounded incredibly similar. They were all clearly American, all clearly New England. The merc wasn’t even bothering to translate now; the intention was clear. The mercs were considering how to handle Stubs.

“I’m wounded!” Stubs shouted loud enough to crack his voice, stumbled a little further into the day, and whipped his bloody shirt sleeves like a flag. “I need a hospital!”

The radio said, “Affirmative. The vehicle is leaking oil. No aftermarket features either. I repeat, no aftermarket features. Please advise.”

Stubs’s good hand dropped. He was anemic, tired, dying. He didn’t have the energy to keep waving and shouting. He simply stared at something only he could see; a yawning future, reaching out to take him. On the shores of some eternity, the Zombie hoped.

“Traffic admin here,” said a man with a thick Russian accent, “clear the lane. Head on collision. Make it clean.”

“Malik?” the Baron asked the Zombie.

The Zombie sighed. “Goodbye, Stubs.”

There was a distant crack of gunfire, and Stubs grunted and slapped the missing digits over a penny-sized hole in his chest. His last words were audible. “My heart,” he uttered. It wasn’t a painless noise. It was sorrow and agony, squeezed out of emptying lungs. The CPUSA were merciless, and they’d taken his life. His legs shook. His limbs gave out from shock. He didn’t exactly pass out, but he collapsed and began fading into unconsciousness and death.

The response was sudden and loud behind the Zombie. Cusswords, shouts of disbelief, and more animal sounds emerged—moans, gasps, a young boy screaming.

The Zombie pulled the front door shut. The safety of the Baron was his first priority, but somewhere on his list of needs, he quietly added the eradication of CPUSA, the death of Malik, and whatever pains he could inflict on child-murderers. In the soulless theater of the mind, in the darkness that had no light nor any true perception, the invincible man swore to kill.

After a long moment of bleak fury, the Baron pressed to talk on the radio. “Monsters!” he shouted into the walkie-talkie. “You knew he was surrendering. I heard you—you chose to murder him. You are murderers of children!”

“Who is this?” the Russian asked. “Identify yourself please.”

“You as well!” the Baron shouted. “You gave the order. The blood is on your hands!”

“Is that the Baron d’Holbach?” the Russian asked.

“Of course it is,” the Baron said bitterly.

Barilla leaned in. “Who are you speaking with?”

“Shut up,” the Zombie said, trotting back across the room.

“It’s an honest question—”

“Shut your mouth before I break it!” the Zombie shouted.

Barilla shrank back. If the Baron was angry, the Zombie multiplied that mood tenfold.

“Is this Andrey Malik?” the Baron asked.

“You’re not sure?” Malik asked.

“Denisov will hear about this,” the Baron said, “he’ll know about your crimes.”

Malik laughed, the volume of his voice turning the sound to static. “He already knows! But this is no longer a question of knowledge. It’s a question of power—manpower, firepower, prestige—and I have it all here. I told you, we Bolsheviks can work alone.”

“If knowledge doesn’t matter, why did you murder that young man? Was it because he was a witness? Or are you just killing people for the hell of it?”

“I didn’t say that. Knowledge is a kind of power, and I’m not going to risk anything. You and I both know how important this search is. We understand the need for… discretion. Dead people don’t tell tales, Baron. You’ve heard the saying, I’m sure.”

“He didn’t know anything,” the Baron said, his lips practically pressed to the radio. “Nobody had to die here. Malik, innocent people don’t have to die for a well-kept secret.”

“I’m sure you’re right, Baron, but the only guarantee is death, and the easiest search happens to be the same method. You may think I’m a monster, but I’m a practical man. I won’t have New York crawling down my throat.”

“What are you going to do? Kill all of us?” He asked the question because only a fool would say yes in front of the Zombie, and he was pushing Malik to consider other options.

“Ah, well, about that,” Malik muttered, “you said it first, Baron. Not I.”

The Zombie narrowed his eyes at the voice on the radio.

“No!” the Baron shouted into the receiver, “Don’t throw their lives away!”

The Zombie stepped closer. “Friend,” he said, his hand extended. “Give me the radio.”

“Don’t kill them,” the Baron pleaded.

“Let me handle this,” the Zombie whispered.

The Baron held the radio in his hand. He didn’t know what would happen if he handed it over. He didn’t know if this would be another massacre like Salem. He couldn’t know.

“Trust me,” the Zombie said.

The Baron reached out and dropped the radio into the Zombie’s hand.

The Zombie caught it, spun around, and caught the eyes of Martin, who was leaning against the back wall with the Garand in hand. “Pick up the merc,” the Zombie commanded. “Help me put him on my shoulder. If I try, I might break him.”

Martin looked at Barilla and Phyllis.

“Go on,” Barilla said.

Phyllis nodded silently. There was no debating the Zombie at a moment like this.

The injured merc groaned and gritted his teeth when Martin lifted him up by his armpits. He let out a cry of pain when his wounded stomach was dropped over the Zombie’s shoulder. The Zombie wrapped him up in his arm like a sack of grain. “Hold still or you’ll shatter your ribs.” He shook the man lightly. “Try to stay up. The blood will rush to your head.”

“What’s he going to do?” Phyllis asked the Baron.

“No idea,” the Baron said.

The Zombie marched to the front door, kicked it open, and strode out into the sunshine. Stubs’ corpse was lying on the sidewalk outside Barilla’s Shoes, soaking in a pool of blood. It seeped through all the little cracks and grains of the concrete.

He lifted up the walkie-talkie and yelled into the receiver, “Attention assholes, this is the invincible man speaking! Have you heard of my Pact? Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach named me the Zombie. He is the only creature on Earth that can give me an order without any risk of dying. If you kill him, there’ll be nobody left to control me. I won’t be stopped. I won’t tire. While I may appear bored, I am dead inside. I have the patience of death. I have its focus. My dear assholes, I could become your personal Grim Reaper. If the Baron dies, I won’t stop with your deaths. I’ll kill everyone who has known you, everyone related to you. I’ll kill the people you admire. I’ll destroy the organization that sponsored you. I’ll tear the world apart until nobody can remember you. I have sworn this pact before, many thousands of years ago, and you haven’t heard the story because nobody survived to tell it.” He let off the radio for a moment and pointed towards the spot where he believed the sniper was camping, near a hedge in front of a building down the block. Then he spoke again, “You there, behind the bushes. I have a survivor here. If you want him, he’s yours. All you have to do is swear that you won’t kill the Baron. Now, now, don’t ask your boss for permission. You aren’t swearing to him—you’re swearing to me! Go ahead and tell me on the radio. Say you won’t kill the Baron.”

He waited. There was a long moment of silence. No answer.

He pressed to talk: “Say it!”

“I won’t kill the Baron,” droned a half-dozen voices at once.

“Very effective,” Malik said over the channel.

The Zombie knelt, setting the injured merc onto his feet. The CPUSA goon wobbled and shivered, drunk and flushed from blood pooling in his brain, but otherwise well enough to not fall. “Go on,” the Zombie said into the microphone, “Go back to your comrades.”

The merc stepped forward, going around Stubs’ body. For several seconds, there was no response. Only wind, birds, and distant traffic. A boat motor, elsewhere.

Malik suddenly spoke on the radio: “All agents, instructions follow. We’ll uphold the Zombie’s pact. However, this protection doesn’t extend to anyone else. You will retire all expendable personnel you encounter. Further instructions will follow on the backup channel, as needed. Otherwise, remain radio silent until ordered to speak. Over and out.”

“All expendable personnel?” the Zombie muttered curiously.

The question was answered immediately. There were four shots fired, coming from locations all up and down the street. The injured merc twitched once, then fell down only a few feet away from Stubs. On his back, a couple of exit wounds began to blossom almost black across the grey of his fatigues. A major artery had been punctured, but even so he shouldn’t be dead that quickly. Someone must’ve shot him in the head.

“Eat shit,” the Zombie muttered. He’d exploded two birds with one impossibly well-pitched stone. The Baron would be safe, and that merc had been thrown to the wolves. Satisfied, he stepped back inside and shut the door behind him.

Author’s Note:

Whew! The fighting gets fiercer, but we’re not clear yet!

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

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July 3, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warnings.

There was a long moment of silence, which imperceptibly morphed into the quiet and insistent sniggering of the Zombie. The Baron cast him a fierce glare, but that only made the Zombie snort once, loudly, a laugh suppressed. He looked again at the gangster. Barilla was embarrassed by the Baron’s reaction, but like all leading mafioso, he turned shame into aggression. He looked about as angry as he must be worried.

“How old is he?” the Baron asked.

“Seventeen.”

It was clear Barilla hadn’t asked Phyllis anything. She wouldn’t have let him put the Cat o’ Nine Lives in anyone so young. “A child,” the Baron said aloud, forcing a calm voice and failing. “You fed an unknown occult object to a child. Why’d you think that was a good idea?”

Barilla was fierce, ready to snap at criticism. “He’s seventeen, he’s a man—”

The Baron raised his voice to match. “Did he decide to swallow it? Did you make him?”

“I asked him!” Barilla shouted. “He chose—”

“Are you blaming your son?”

“Fuck you!”

“Was he informed? Is he a cultist?”

“I told him everything I knew.”

“You don’t know anything!”

“I don’t have to, prick! I knew enough!”

“Tell me what the Cat does!”

“It makes you tougher. Makes you stronger.”

“Fuck!” The Baron waved his arm in one swift arc, dismissing the entire thing. “We have to go now. If we don’t cut the Cat out of your son, he’ll be the primary target.”

“Target?” Barilla was exasperated. “You want to cut him open?”

“People are looking for you—for the Cat. Once they figure out that you don’t have it, they’ll be all over your home, your businesses, your family. They’ll tear everything apart.”

“You can’t cut my son open!”

The Baron was thinking quickly. He had to get Barilla on his side long enough to reach the kid and cut out the Cat—where? They’d need a doctor. “We can heal him with prestige, we just need enough. Our client—the original owner of the Cat—he’ll have enough.”

“You can heal people? Like layin’ on hands?”

“Something like that.”

There was a loud pop outside the building, like someone setting off a firecracker in the street. A common twitch, shoulders tensing and heads lowered—except for the Zombie, who grinned broadly. That was the sound of modern violence, defined and redefined by television and movies. It was a manifest threat, and a sign that the Baron and the Zombie were too late to easily extract Barilla. Gunfire signaled that enemy mercenaries were already here.

“Who’s shooting?” Barilla shouted at Martin, as if his guard would know.

“It’s Schuler,” the Baron suggested, “the priest you saw outside.” The Diviner had talked about keeping people safe; if someone waved a gun at him, he’d fight on principle.

The Zombie was irrepressibly happy. “Or that’s someone Schuler just hurt. Either way, we’ve got the Diviner on our side.”

“For now,” the Baron said sharply. “We can’t trust him.”

Tires screeched on the pavement. The noise was followed by a fusillade of firepower, fired not at the building but away from it.

Phyllis threw open the door to the hall. “Barilla!” she roared at her boss. “Make calls! Get someone on the line. Get men! Get armed men!”

“Phyllis?” he asked, dazed by the sudden shift.

“Get on the phone!” she demanded.

Barilla ran for the door, everyone else trailing behind. Just inside the door, Barilla’s street gang could be seen lying flat on the carpet, minimizing the chance of intercepting a stray shot. Phyllis put a hand out to stop the Baron and pushed him back out into the hall. She stopped in front of the Zombie but deliberately avoided touching him. “A word.”

“Yes?” the Baron asked.

“I heard your shouting. What do you need?”

The Baron didn’t have time to consider or reconsider who could be trusted and who’d make a good ally. They were probably seconds away from being sieged. He went with the bare minimum. “Barilla’s son. We’ll need him next.”

“Why?” she asked.

“We’ll talk if we survive.”

She squeezed her lips tight, making her subtle wrinkles stand out around the edges of her mouth. She exuded authority, but the Baron and Zombie weren’t followers. She’d have to forgo control of the situation or be left out. “I’ll survive,” she said. “I’ll hold you to your word.”

Barilla was shouting into the handset. “Send everyone! Tommies, dynamite, rifles—whatever you’ve got. I don’t know… no, I don’t fucking know. Just hurry!” He slammed the phone on the receiver. “Jesus, like twenty questions… of all the goddamn times.”

Phyllis entered the room. “Make another call.”

“Who? I don’t know that many numbers.”

She paused. The Baron thought that the right answer would’ve been Tammany Hall, but Phyllis couldn’t risk bringing New York into this situation. They’d persecute her as an Artemisian. “The police,” she said lamely, realizing there were no other good options.

Barilla furrowed his brow. “I just called in the boys. I ain’t calling the heat on ‘em.”

The Baron and the Zombie were still standing at the door. “Is there a back entrance?” the Baron asked.

“What? Why?” Barilla asked.

“Listen!” the Zombie commanded.

Everyone paused, listening.

The Zombie pointed down the hall, towards the front of the building and the rising sounds of gunfire. Schuler wasn’t in a fight with only a few weapons; multiple automatic firearms clattered and banged like typewriters, straining to write the final bloody sentences of Schuler’s story. A moment later, a sextet of bullets struck the outer brick wall with low cracks, like someone breaking thick curls of dried mud under heavy boots.

“Point taken,” Barilla muttered, wiping his mouth with a sweaty hand. “There’re six entrances. Only the front door is open.”

“Padlocked the rest?” the Baron asked.

“Yeah, with chains.”

“They’ll have enough prestige to unlock them. There’s multiple men fighting Schuler—”

“A small platoon,” the Zombie judged.

“—so I’d say they’ll have most of the doors covered.”

“What the hell do we do then?” Barilla asked.

The Baron took a deep breath. There were two options. Stay, defend this office, and hope that the enemy wasn’t willing to bring down the structure with ordinance or prestige. The other was to find a weak point in the enemy perimeter, probably on the opposite side from Schuler’s pitched battle. He preferred that one, but it only worked if they moved fast. “We’re surrounded,” he announced, “but we still have the element of surprise.”

“What surprise?” Barilla asked. “They know we’re here.”

“They know you’re here. If your bodyguard drives you, they know he’s here, but they don’t know if we’re here yet, and they definitely don’t know about Phyllis or your street gang.” The Baron looked over the crowd. “This building is too easy to search. It’s line rooms and tables, nowhere to hide the kids. We need to pick a way out and move, now.”

“Nobody goes towards the front entrance,” the Zombie said. “Nobody but me.”

The Baron continued issuing orders: “Just stick close. The enemy will spread out, try to enter the building. Let’s head for one of the doors on the far side. Make a break for it.”

Phyllis squared her shoulders. “Baron, with all respect, that won’t work. If they want to surround us, they can just park at the corners and sit with rifles. We’ll have to wait for the Anastasia boys. They can break us out.”

The Baron grimaced. Of course, the other natural leader in the room had adopted the alternative strategy without hesitation, and they didn’t have time for an extended argument. “How about a compromise? Once we reach a door, we scout the situation. The Zombie clears the space ahead of us, and we go where he goes. Even through a wall.”

“As long as we’re careful, I’d consider it,” Phyllis said.

“Sounds stupid,” whispered the young man with the missing fingers.

Barilla scowled. “Yeah, you want us running across open rooms.”

The Baron cast his hands outwards at the office around them, a flimsy, wooden structure. “I don’t like the alternative. These men have prestige, a great deal of it. They could bring these walls down on our heads, start fires, disorient and disarm.”

Phyllis’s brows raised about as high as they could go. “That much?”

“They silenced two gunfights this morning alone,” the Zombie said.

Phyllis’s eyes went wide. “Who are we facing?”

“I don’t know,” the Baron said, a half-truth. He knew the enemy cult and their motivations, but not the specific source of the men or their weapons. The Soviets couldn’t just summon an army from thin air. Was this a true mercenary force, or some kind of genuine fifth column that’d been hiding inside New York territory? Either way, it was a frightening amount of power to wield on American soil. Wars had been started over less.

 Phyllis faced her boss with a grim glare. “Sir, we should go.”

As Phyllis spoke, the dreadful shadow of belief eclipsed Barrila’s face. A lowered brow darkened his small eyes. “Fine, fuck me for staying in cover.”

“They really can collapse the ceiling,” Phyllis added.

Barilla raised a hand in frustrated surrender. “I know, I know. Jesus, fuck.” His eyes darted around, meeting the looks of his miserable crew—practically a band of child soldiers. “Listen to the man, boys. We’re going.” A deep breath. “Shit.”

“All right!” The Baron clapped his hands together once, calling the room to attention. Boys were already rising at the conversation, but they jumped to their feet like they’d heard a drill instructor. “Here’s the brief. Behind the offices is the waterfront. Nowhere to run, open terrain. On the other side, in front of the building, it’s a war zone. We’ll take a side exit.”

Even now, there were sounds of gunfire coming from out front, though at a much lower frequency. People had metaphorically dug into positions, taking cover. Schuler was still clearly alive, likely holding a gun himself, given the back and forth barks of smokeless powder. The Baron didn’t know how long that stability would last. Once Schuler found an opportunity—or once the enemy decided to press Schuler’s position—their fighting would reach a crescendo, and given what he’d seen of Diviner combat over the centuries, this would almost certainly entail a tremendous amount of property destruction.

In truth, this escape would only be possible because Schuler was drawing a great deal of enemy attention towards himself. The Baron made a mental note to thank him later, assuming they made it out of here alive and without capture.

“I know the way,” Barilla said, gesturing towards the wall with the door in it. “Fully across the building, near the back corner. We used to take shipments there.”

The Baron nodded. “Any cover along that side? Dumpsters, barricades?”

“There’s a Dempster,” Barilla said.

The Baron recognized the brandname—a small truck-loaded dumpster. “Good. There’s a fair chance they’ll have some forces on all sides, so we’re going to cross the factory along the waterfront side, close to the outer wall itself. That gives them the worst firing angles through any windows. Any complaints?”

Phyllis sighed. “No complaints, but there’s not much complexity here, Baron. It’s four workfloors in a square grid. If anyone gets inside, it’s a shooting gallery, and we only have one revolver and some zip-guns.”

The Baron understood. “We’ll have the Zombie scout the area first. Barilla, what’s the door like at the exit?”

“It’s a fold-up garage door. We used it to move machines before the war.”

The Baron feared it’d be something like that. “It’s the kind of thing the enemy might open before we even get there. Zombie, move quickly, draw attention. Fake an injury if you get shot, and make them question your identity. You can clear the path once we know where we’re going.”

The Zombie laughed under his breath, grinning. “This will be fun.”

The Baron quickly pointed to each of the kids in turn. “Once we’re moving, you’ll fall in behind Phyllis and in front of Barilla. Martin and I will follow the Zombie directly.”

“What’s happening?” asked the youngest member of the street gang, a boy who’d only begun to grow a dirt lip mustache.

“Bunch of goons are trying to swipe the boss,” said the boy missing fingers.

“We going to rumble?”

“No man, we’re cutting it. We tussle? That’s the end.”

The Baron clapped again. “We’re out of time. Zombie, make it fast.”

The Zombie gave the Baron a smart salute, opened the door to the office, and looked in both directions along the little hall. Then he slipped out, vanishing for a couple minutes.

About a minute into the wait, Barilla said, “Where is he?”

The Baron scowled. “He’s scouting. He’ll be back.”

Another thirty seconds passed. Barilla started speaking: “How long—”

“Boss,” Phyllis interrupted.

“What?”

“He’s invincible, and he always comes for the Baron. Just wait.”

Barilla turned away, frustrated.

Thank you, the Baron mouthed to Phyllis. She cast him a discreet thumbs up.

A sudden knock at the door. Everyone twitched, and then the Zombie’s voice came through, soft and low, “I’m back.”

“Come in,” the Baron said.

The Zombie slipped inside. “That far garage door? It’s open.”

“Shit,” Barilla whispered.

“Did someone come inside?” the Baron asked.

“Yeah, I’m guessing they’re in the back room on the other side of the building. For now, they’re still grouping up. Nobody has breached any of the other rooms.”

“You checked?”

“Yeah. I scouted the other quarters. The front of the building is clear, though Martin left the front propped open, so I shut it quietly.”

“You locked it?” Martin asked.

The Zombie nodded curtly. “Chain and padlock. Baron, we can circle around the middle, then cross over to the far corner. There’s another shutter door there, facing the same alley. I think we can sneak out without a gunfight. We just have to crawl under the front windows.”

Passing by windows was a frightening notion. “Nobody shot at you?” the Baron asked.

“Nothing. No motion, but I know why you’re worried. Do you want to risk it?”

“We have to,” the Baron said. “We can’t stay here. Lead the way.”

“Can do.”

The Zombie waved them out into the hallway, heading towards the exit at the back of the hall, closest to the waterfront. Martin came up behind him, close and low, treating the Zombie like a shield. The Baron followed, and Phyllis squeezed into the space next to him. Behind them stalked the kids—the young man with the missing fingers first in line—and Barilla was standing at the back with a small revolver, watching the front end of the hall.

“Where we going?” whispered a kid. Someone put a hand on his mouth, and Phyllis gave him a look as fierce as a slap. He shut his trap too tight to apologize.

The Baron breathed out, squeezing his diaphragm to squelch frustration. Children. They’d reviewed the plan only minutes ago, but this one clearly hadn’t listened. He admired school teachers for handling impulsive and inattentive children across an entire career.

The Zombie paused at the swinging doors at the end of the hall, kneeled quietly, and looked underneath. Then he rose and pushed through, peeking out as if his body were at risk. When nothing happened, he stalked forward into the empty factory floor, glancing around furtively.

The windows here were nailed over with pressed boards, ill-fitting. Sunlight leaked in around the edges, casting everything in a sad gloom. There was no other sign of ventilation, and no suggestion that the windows could be opened. It must’ve been miserably hot when the room was full of sewing machines and underpaid workers. Even now it stank a little like sweat and tanned leather.

The Zombie stopped in the middle of the space, visibly relaxing. It must be clear, with all doors accounted for and closed. He waved the group forward.

Martin caught up with the Zombie first; the Baron and the rest followed in his steps. Barilla slowed the hall door while it swung shut, keeping the hinges from squeaking. They stalked through the dim factory floor, listening to both primary sounds and their soft echoes bouncing off broad walls. It was a crowd of shuffling footsteps; a mob of heavy breathing; a funeral parade, complete with distant twenty-one gun salutes. Schuler was still fighting. The percussion of racing hearts overlaid everything.

The invincible man walked along the inner brick wall, listening carefully until he reached the inside corner of the factory floor. He stopped in front of a pair of swinging doors close to the inside of the building—the kind that a materials cart could push aside—and he peered through the central gap with an eye. A thumbs up, all clear.

The Baron silently signalled for him to proceed.

The Zombie pushed the doors open as if he were afraid of making a sound, squinting towards distant, clear windows. The Baron could see sunlight, reflecting in a long streak across the coated concrete, interrupted by some strips of black anti-slip tape. There was a flicker of motion somewhere outside; a figure in black was running away from the building, ducking out of view behind a distant, parked vehicle. A moment later, there was a clear pop of rifle fire out there. Schuler was still drawing attention away from the front.

The Zombie hesitated, moving his head from side to side to check the firing angles that faced into the factory’s windows. Then he turned and waved everyone to follow.

The Baron and Phyllis entered the empty room first, hugging close to the right wall; the kids came after. Martin rushed in next, and finally Barilla, shuddering as if every step was already pushing his limits. He was openly afraid, and that wasn’t helping his street gang. When they looked at their boss, wide eyes sought hope or strength and found little of either.

The Zombie checked the closest swinging doors along the right wall, aiming to minimize the time they spent passing through this room. Schuler’s fighting was beginning to lull. People were dying, or they were backing off. He waved to the Baron, whispering. “See the windows?”

The Baron stepped into place beside the door, peering through the gap and trying to scout the angles. There were two windows facing the front street, both on a strip of wall near the front door. One of them had a panel knocked out; glittering shards traced an impact angle across the concrete. The other half of the factory quadrant laid in a deeper gloom. Unless you were up against a window, you couldn’t see into the corner.

Another fold-up garage door was on the outside wall there, facing the same alley. Still closed. “You’re right.” He stepped back. “You first. I’ll move everyone afterwards.”

The Zombie nodded, pushed the doors open very slowly, and slid through sideways, dropping low along the inside wall of the floor. The Baron leaned into the door to keep it from swinging shut, and watched the Zombie’s progress with a single eye.

The Zombie crawled forward, peering constantly into the sunlight streaming from the windows. He paused at one point, held up two fingers back to the Baron, then subtly mimed a steering wheel. After that, he kept moving until he was in position. The pops of bullets were getting distant now.

The Baron turned back towards Phyllis, who was just behind him. “At least two cars,” he whispered to her.

“Eight people?”

“Minimum. Gunfire suggests more.”

The Zombie stopped against the front wall, effectively in cover. From there, he could crawl under the windows as necessary. He waved, signalling the Baron to follow.

The Baron pulled the swinging door fully open, using himself as a stop. “On the count of three,” he whispered to the crowd behind him, “everyone crosses the room along the left wall, heading for the front. Quiet and quick. Barilla and I will bring up the rear.”

The Zombie was standing in the middle of the shadowed region, keeping watch over all the other doors to the room. Another thumbs-up. This was the time.

The Baron counted with his fingers. “Three. Two. One. Go.”

Martin ran out, half-crouched, and went fast along the left wall. Phyllis went second, wearing work boots and wool pants, not women’s shoes and a dress. She might’ve been a factory worker before she took over Barilla’s occult enterprise. She was in shape regardless, and simply ran, catching up to Martin. The street gang came out behind her in a rough band, huddled down and moving but not as quickly as they could. There was a bit of hesitation, as if they were afraid of stepping on each other’s heels. For a long moment, no reactions from outside, or from any other doors. Barilla paused beside the Baron.

“Do you think—”

Then crack of a rifle, thunderously loud, instantly followed by the glassy crinkling of a window panel, already shattered, now spilling out onto the floor. The Baron flinched, but his immediate reaction was regret. It was an ambush after all. The kids were half-crouched, pausing, unsure if they should hit the ground, looking to see if anyone was hurt.

“Run!” the Baron roared. Barilla was still beside him. He grabbed the old gangster by the lapel of his expensive suit, yanked hard enough to rip a button off the jacket and threw him forward, then charged after him right into the mass of kids. The shout seemed to set them moving; the next two shots taken made them sprint. Someone was already screaming. The Baron nearly tripped over the gangster with missing fingers. He was grabbing his side below the ribs. The stubs of his knuckles were drenched in pulsing gushes of dark blood.

There was no time to stop. If anyone fell, the Zombie could retrieve them.

Barilla practically rammed into the younger kids as they stumbled into the safety of the brick wall, rushing for an angle that got them away from the windows. Two of them tripped up and fell, hitting the concrete floor with heavy thuds. The Baron himself had too much momentum to stop; he leaped over a fallen street gangster before Martin arrested his motion, already coming back to help the fallen. Barilla and him grabbed one of the two stumbling boys, maybe fifteen, and together, they yanked him by the arms into safety. The other one kicked forward until he was up and running again, joining the rest along the wall just behind the locked front door.

“Stubs!” one of the boys cried out.

The Baron looked back. Stubs wasn’t standing, but he was still on his knees in a long, yellow band of sunlight, clasping his belly with two hands and gasping, failing to breathe. More heavy pulses of blood over his hands. The shot had knocked the air out of him.

Before anyone could bark another order, the Zombie vaulted a production line and openly sprinted across the factory floor towards Stubs. A fourth round came through the windows, catching the invincible man in the flank with a burst of wool, fluttering his open jacket. The Zombie barely noticed. In one fluid motion, he grabbed Stubs under the legs and back, swept him up, and hauled him bodily to safety across open ground, shielding the kid with his own back turned to the windows.

A fifth and final shot shattered across the Zombie’s spine; the Baron could see fragments of a smashed bullet flying up like the contents of a party popper, surreally metallic in the last slice of sunlight before the Zombie ran their casualty to the destination.

Phyllis grabbed the Baron’s sleeve. “Sniper?” she hissed.

“Hunting rifle,” the Baron guessed.

“Crawl!” the Zombie rasped, a half-whisper and a half-yell, a single strained cry. He knelt to gently set Stubs down against the outer wall. The young man gasped in his first full breath, squeaking with growing agony.

Phyllis followed instructions, quickly ducking beneath the front windows while carefully avoiding any of the patches of shattered glass. The rest of the street gang followed her lead, and Martin and Barilla trailed right after them, passing in cover. The Baron brought up the rear, grimacing at the rising sounds of human suffering.

Once they were clear of the windows, Martin and Barilla both ran over to Stubs in the corner, reaching tentatively towards him with their hands. What could they even do?

The Zombie came back to meet the Baron, pulling off his cheap bowler and handing it over. The Baron took it without question, nodding. The Zombie was about to smash something or scream, probably both.

The invincible man stopped in front of the damaged window, staring through the remaining panes in the direction of the sniper that’d shot Stubs.

Shouts filtered in from somewhere outside: “It’s Zed! Zed! Hold your fire!”

The Zombie took a deep breath, and he hollered at a volume that would’ve harmed a man, unleashing a feral bellow that could only erupt from invincible lungs and an unbreakable larynx. Still screaming, he threw his head forward into the multi-pane window, headbutting the crossbar, shattering another two panes and knocking out the bottom half of the window in a crash of shards and metal. Glass scattered off his head and clothes like water, and he leaned out the collapsing window as his roar became words, “Fuck off or die motherfuckers!” While he yelled, he pounded on the sides of the windowsill with his fists, knocking off chunks of metal with loud pangs, an inhuman display of violent intent.

Then he fell silent, waiting for an answer. He didn’t even take a followup breath. He froze and waited, half-leaning out the window with a furious stare. No response came. Wind blew, traffic rumbled, and Stubs whimpered.

Everyone inside the factory had flinched except for the Baron himself. He knew that fury well. Someone had shot at them and hit an adolescent, and the Zombie couldn’t leave the room to retaliate. For the next few minutes, until things inevitably changed, they were effectively trapped, and the Zombie’s presence was the only clear shield against a full assault. He might be the only reason they weren’t already dead on the cold factory floor.

The silence around them was itself a terrible new truth. If Schuler was still fighting out there, there was no further sign of it. The Diviner had disappeared, or at least gone to ground for a moment, leaving them all alone in the false peace of hesitation. The Baron didn’t trust that it would last. Someone had already taken a shot at them. They’d try again soon.

It was a gut feeling. After the fighting at the Belmont-Sutter Homes, the Baron knew there was something strange about these mercs, likely hired and armed by Bolshevik factionalists. In the moment that one killer shot another, horror had seeded itself in the Baron’s heart, only now bearing its bitter fruit. In spite of the Pact, these men fought like they wanted to die, and what threat could the Zombie muster against a principled murder-suicide?

Absolutely none. Any zealot was a critical threat.

Author’s Note:

Lives are on the line. Youth is cut short.

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other readers!

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July 2, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warnings.

Martin walked out into the hall. Barilla came around his desk, patted Phyllis on the shoulder as he passed, and went out the door. “Come along, Baron!”

“It’ll have to do,” the Baron whispered to the Zombie.

The Zombie nodded and went out the door first. Barilla and Martin were standing just a few feet down the hall. The Baron paused behind the Zombie, physically shielded.

“Miles!” Barilla shouted at the kid stopping the door. “Get inside, shut the door, and don’t come out unless I say so. Grown men are talking.”

“Sir!” The kid nearly jumped. The door slammed shut in his wake.

Once it was clear from their relaxed stances that neither side planned violence, at least not immediately, Barilla stepped in front of Martin and the Baron stepped in front of the Zombie. Their human weapons were behind them. It was time to talk.

The Baron lobbied one more time for privacy. “Anyone can be a risk, especially if they have a criminal history. They’ll have skeletons in their closet—potential leverage.”

“Sure, sometimes,” Barilla said, “but Martin here is in my pocket. I know where the bodies are buried.” He jabbed a thumb at the man behind him. “Nobody can squeeze this guy. Not some made up goon you’re pissing and moaning about. This ain’t a spy flick.”

The Baron didn’t respond to the paltry insult. Barilla was naturally aggressive, and neither antagonism nor appeasement would help. The only path out was disengagement, which would eventually drive Barilla to ask him to speak—to give up momentum to the Baron.

Barilla continued. “You think you’re clever, but you drop hints like Martin here takes a shit. It’s loud, it’s noisy, it stinks down the hall.”

“Hints for what?” the Baron said flatly.

“You want me alone for something, fine, but then you start giving Phyllis the evil eye and everything but the kiss of death, and I have to wonder, who is this man? What does he know about my second-in-command?”

“Even I could tell you were threatening the lady,” Martin said.

“Shut it!” Barilla said, “Baron? Baron and Zombie? What kind of titles are those? If it weren’t for Phyllis, I’d think you were a pair of idiots like the priest out front.”

“He’s not an idiot,” the Zombie said matter of factly.

“Shut it!” Barilla shouted. “Jesus Christ, don’t you know when you’re being talked at? Were you raised by the circus? If you don’t have manners, at least pay attention. Do you see where you are? Do you see who you’re alone with?”

“The boss of the docks,” the Baron said idly.

“You’re alone with us.” He indicated Martin and himself with a broad, heavy hand. “We’ve got two hundred pounds on you, and nancy suits like you aren’t armed.”

The Baron raised an eyebrow. Barilla would have it out of his system soon, but that was an irresistible prompt. “How do you know that?” he asked.

“Phyllis thinks you’re important. That means you think you’re important. You’re used to getting your way because of a reputation, but look at those hands. You work out in a gym, like all fucking nancies. You think you’re hard, but you ain’t. You ain’t hard.”

“We do get our way often,” the Baron agreed.

“Not with me, asshole,” Barilla said. “Now fess up before Martin knocks out your teeth. What do you have on Phyllis? What don’t I know?”

The Baron didn’t hesitate to answer, “Nothing.” While he could certainly gain a little of Barilla’s trust by throwing Phyllis under the bus, he’d never do it. The woman had a long occult career ahead of her, especially if she’d made it to her 40s in New York City. He could preserve her secret and still win Barilla over. It’d only take time, and while they probably didn’t have much to spend, he’d spend whatever he needed on keeping an Artemisian safe.

“Bullshit!” Barilla snorted and spat at the Baron’s feet. “Don’t make me ask again.”

The Baron looked down. At least the man hadn’t actually spat on his shoes. He picked at the corner of his eye, body language signaling a mix of exhaustion and boredom. “I think you misunderstand. Phyllis wanted to listen in. I wanted Phyllis to understand why she couldn’t. If it’d been your bodyguard speaking up, we would’ve argued with him instead.”

Barilla closed his eyes like he was getting a headache. “For God’s sake, do you hear yourself? Why do you think these people have a choice in the matter? Why do you think you have a choice?” His voice was rising. “I’m the boss here—this is my fucking wharf!” He thumped his own chest. “Tomorrow, my son is going to lead my street gang into Cougar territory, and they’re going to beat a man halfway to death, not because he did anything but just to make a bloody point. We’re not to be fucked with! We own this slice of Red Hook, and I’m in charge!” Three thumps to the sternum marked the last three words, loud enough to make it sound like Barilla was punching himself. It would’ve been intimidating to almost anyone else.

The Zombie burst into laughter instead.

Barilla shouted, “You think this is a joke?”

“He’s invincible,” the Baron said.

“What?” Barilla glanced at Martin, who was blank-faced in order to maintain an air of competency instead of confusion. “What the hell does that mean?” Barilla asked the Baron.

Now this was an opportunity. Barilla was handing him the reins. He had to gently lead him without making him feel like he’d lost control. First, a feint. “I’ll explain later,” he said dismissively. This would encourage Barilla to reask the question, to double down on his demand to be educated.

Barilla sucked in his breath, trying to control his anger. “Later?”

“You want to know now?”

“You’re fucking with me,” Barilla said.

“I’m not. The Zombie is truly invincible.” The Baron took a deep breath. “I think this requires a little explanation. You’re in charge, Barilla, I’m not challenging that—not even he’s challenging that. But I’m two hundred years old, and he’s literally invincible. Phyllis knows us because we’re famous. All that supernatural bullshit you leave to her? We drowned in it long ago.”

Barilla’s nose twisted up like he didn’t like the smell of what the Baron gave him. “You expecting me to believe that? Phyllis ain’t mentioned you before.”

“Our last visit to New York was in the 20s. Phyllis would’ve been a teenager.”

Barilla was confused. He couldn’t figure out why the Baron was making wild claims about unnatural age. “You’re half my age,” he said incredulously.

“I haven’t aged for two hundred years,” the Baron said.

Barilla turned to Martin and whispered a short, fierce phrase. The Baron couldn’t make out what was said, but he firmly believed it didn’t matter. The core problem was fast becoming clear. Barilla wasn’t as stupid as imagined. He was willfully ignorant, yes, but while that was foolish, it was also focused, and this man was knee-deep in violence and death. He didn’t have time for something as abstract as religion, even if it had practical effects. All that mattered was the scramble to stay on top of his little corner of the underworld, and to him, the Baron’s messages weren’t about killers or tasks from the gods. They were about trust. The seeds of mistrust were planted, but he couldn’t dispose of the perceived threat. Barilla needed Phyllis terribly, and he knew it. Even as she skimmed off the top of his ignorance, she also relieved him of all obligations to the occult world. He needed to believe the Baron was a liar or a scoundrel, or his natural paranoia would overwhelm him. “Fuck me,” he said to the Baron.

The Baron didn’t blame him for this reaction. Barilla was only doing what was best for his survival under normal, secular circumstances. Unfortunately, an occult force would be coming for him soon. There was no doubt about that. The only questions were of scale and purpose. Who was coming, and how many men would they bring? How much prestige?

“Look, I can prove that I’m telling the truth. You saw that the Zombie took the knife from the boy Miles. You know it isn’t a trick blade.”

“I know he tricked the kid into handing it over,” Barilla said.

The Zombie opened the penny knife. “Do you want to see another trick?”

“No need to be that aggressive,” the Baron said promptly. “Barilla, please take the knife from the Zombie and attempt to cut his hand.”

“I’m not stepping near a man with a blade.”

“Would you rather that Martin did it?”

Barilla glanced at his man. Gave him a nod of command.

Martin circled around his boss, walked by the Baron close enough to bury him in the shadow of his bulk, and then reached the Zombie with a fat palm open to accept the knife. “How do you want me to cut you?” Martin asked.

“Do it however you like,” the Zombie said, short and curt. “Just don’t cut the shirt. I want to look nice until lunch.”

Martin wrapped his fist around the handle, took the Zombie’s hand in his own, and lightly ran the edge of the knife across the Zombie’s palm. When it didn’t cut, he glanced up at Zombie’s grin, then ran the blade across his invincible skin again. “Why aren’t you cut?” Martin asked.

The Zombie laughed lightly. “I’m invincible. Go ahead, stab down at my palm.”

Martin didn’t immediately follow directions. He sliced a third time, much harder, visibly straining like a man pressing on an iron anvil. The Zombie’s skin bent around the blade, but it did not break. Martin looked the Zombie in the eyes. The Baron could see what Martin saw. There was only joy there. It was more terrifying than confidence. It was enough to make the gangster cringe, but he turned the point down and aimed it at the Zombie’s palm.

“You might want to let my hand go. For your own safety.”

Martin released him without question, but he glanced at the Baron. “If I put this through his palm, would he go to the hospital?”

“I’d pay for anyone injured,” the Baron said.

Martin stabbed down. The blade struck the Zombie’s palm and deflected, as if he were jamming it into an immovable, friction-free surface. Martin’s arm kept going down, blade sliding between the Zombie’s fingers, his sense of balance thrown.

“Steady!” the Baron shouted.

Martin jerked back as if he were about to fall, though he wasn’t. The blade fell from his hand and clattered on the floor. “Oh, fuck,” he murmured.

The Zombie leaned over to pick up the knife, close it, and return it to his pocket. 

“What the hell?” Barilla asked Martin. “Did you stab him?”

“I did, boss. Yeah.”

“You hit him dead in the palm?”

“I really did, boss.”

“Are you telling me his hand can deflect a knife?” Barilla’s tone was angry, but Martin was too smart to lie. Repeating the question wouldn’t make the truth change.

Martin nodded, stepping back. “Boss, I think he’s really invincible.”

“He is,” the Baron said. “Absolutely so.”

The Zombie took off his hat, spinning the edge of the bowler across his palm. “They once threw me into a volcano.” He tossed it up and caught it on his head. “I twitched until the stone shattered around me, and I ripped my way out of granite.”

That was a legend, not a provable historical event, but the Baron wasn’t going to undermine his friend’s message on a technicality. Instead, he moved to seal the truth in Barilla’s mind. “The Zombie is unstoppable. He’s the only reason I’m alive, and he’s proof.”

“Of what?” Barilla asked.

“Of everything! The occult, the reason I’m here to talk with you. I’m old, he’s invincible, and there are two questions I must ask before we leave.”

Martin slowly walked back behind Barilla.

The boss gave the Baron an appraising look. “That supernatural stuff ain’t right,” Barilla said. “Honest, I ain’t questioning God’s angels, but there shouldn’t be a man that nobody can kill. It just ain’t good.”

That was a Catholic interpretation for the system of prestige—that the gods were just angels directing the daily grind of ineffable purpose and divine intervention. The Baron wondered if Barilla had learned what little he knew from a Vatican cultist. If so, that’d explain his ignorance. They tended to provide little to no education for their neophytes and associates, preferring to assign tasks on authority alone. Vatican chapters were rare in New York, but a couple of them operated freely. They just paid the same tariffs as any other vassal cult.

“I agree more than you might imagine,” the Baron said. “If I even believed in the gods, I wouldn’t call them angels. They don’t care about moral good. Only men do that.” He looked at his watch. “We’ve been here longer than I wanted. Barilla, do you know what an artifact is?”

“It’s a supernatural thing; does things for you?” Barilla asked.

“Yes.” The Baron hesitated. Barilla had no clue about the importance or rarity of artifacts. The key here was to speak in a way that simplified the picture for the man, that made it easier for him to process. “Jacono gave you an artifact, yes?”

Barilla frowned. “Sure he did. Said he wanted to wash his hands of the deal, get out.”

That made sense. Jacono would’ve realized that Nagy was someone important, and being associated with his death would’ve had dangerous repercussions. Keeping the artifact would’ve been like drawing a target on his chest. Of course, trying to pawn the artifact off to Barilla hadn’t worked either. Someone still shot him dead in the street.

“New York doesn’t have it,” the Baron said, “so what happened to it?”

“I kept it. I figured if Jacono didn’t want it around, I’d just keep it hidden.”

“Did Jacono tell you how to use it?”

“He said to swallow it in an emergency and it’d protect me.”

The Baron felt a cold twinge of dread anticipation. He didn’t want to hear the answer, but he had to ask, “Did you swallow it?”

“No,” Barilla said.

d’Holbach felt relief. They wouldn’t have to cut it out of a gangster.

“Why?” Barilla asked, “It would’ve been fine if I did, right?”

The Baron rubbed his forehead with his thumb. “Yes and no. Swallowing it wouldn’t hurt you, but you’d have made a lot of enemies. Where is it now?”

“I fed it to my son,” Barilla said.

Author’s Note:

AAAAAAAA – the Baron’s thought process at this very moment.

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other readers!

Join the Patreon to support the story and access 4 weeks of early chapters!

July 1, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warnings.

Smoking a green cigar with the window down changed the flavor, mellowed it without becoming smoky. The wind pulled at the burning leaf, and the Baron faced the open air to keep the ash from scattering onto his lap with every draw. In another time and place, it would’ve bothered the Baron to smoke under these conditions, but he only wanted enough nicotine to soothe, not to excite his nerves. With the central partition up and the window down, the cabbie permitted the vices of a man with taste and wealth. The dollar tip didn’t hurt either.

The Zombie was inspecting his dress shirt for drops of blood. There weren’t any, but despite his careless attitude about damaging clothes, he preferred to leave a sharp impression.

“That’s vain of you,” the Baron noted.

“Clothes are like tissues,” the Zombie responded primly. “They’re disposable, but you’d rather use something clean, even if it doesn’t truly matter.” He smoothed his sleeves and grinned. “Why are you smoking in a car?”

“I’m feeling… bothered. Also, I might stink of gunpowder.”

“You’re bothered?”

“Men died.”

“You saw a lot of dead people during the Fall of Trust,” the Zombie said. He’d killed a lot of people in front of the Baron during that decade in Europe.

“That bothered me too, but that’s not the problem here. Well, not the primary problem. That mafioso with the thick lips and mustache? He wanted revenge, and I told him he could have it.” He drew on the double claro, held the flavor—like herbs with a hint of grass and fruit, all burning—and blew the smoke out over the open road, gone in the wind.

The Zombie chuckled. “You’re going to need to explain that one.”

With his free hand, the Baron scratched the side of his nose. “Am I really the virtuous atheist? After all that?”

“I’d say so.”

The Baron grunted with dissatisfaction. “I promised one man to the dogs, and I probably killed the other while shooting to wound him. Not because it was good or bad either. Only because it was convenient.” He took a brief draw.

They were passing into the Red Hook area. Small brick homes stood between empty office buildings. The low rooftops and endless grimy alleys reminded the Baron of missing teeth in an old soldier’s mouth. Most of the war industry in this neighborhood had been abandoned within days of the German surrender, and few of their factories had produced for the Pacific Theatre. All that remained were the stevedores working the mouth of the Hudson. This place formed the first stage of the Erie Canal and essentially controlled shipping north to the Great Lakes. It was also a hotbed of secular Cosa Nostra activity, with almost every laborer paying dues to a mob-controlled union boss while playing deaf and dumb to murder and theft.

“Seems like you cared more about the results,” the Zombie replied after some time. “The stakes could be the world. No half-measures, right?”

“I don’t know? Maybe, probably even. At that moment, I just knew I wasn’t going to scrap with gangsters for the right to hand the man over to the police. It wasn’t moral.”

The Zombie reached out with a hand, then hesitated. No reason to risk a touch when there wasn’t much need for it. “Listen, you’re not wrong. You’ve changed, but for the better.”

The Baron glanced out the crack of the open window. Smoke and ashes fluttered off the tip of his cigar like butterfly wings, caught in a high spring breeze. “You think so?”

“I know it. In 1800, even after ten years of running in my bloody footprints, you wouldn’t have given that man to the Cosa Nostra. You might’ve risked your life to save your enemy. Now, you recognize that a murderer is worth less than the people you’ll help ”

“Mm. Times have changed.” The Baron drew briefly on the cigar, just to keep the tobacco burning. “Maybe I have a little too. Everything feels different after the atomic bomb.” He looked over at the Zombie. “What makes you so confident in your philosophy?”

“I’ve killed a lot of people, all kinds, and they’ve left all kinds of holes in the world. Some of them make the world better only by leaving it.”

The Baron frowned. “Could you ever tell which was which?”

The Zombie laughed. “I’d love to lie and say yes, but truthfully, I’ve never cared. I just noticed how things change. I’ve learned what killing means.”

The Baron shrugged. “I still haven’t figured it out—even after a world war or two. Or three, if you count the Napoleonic Wars.”

The Zombie smirked with such smug bravado that it nearly broke the Baron’s somber mood. Then he followed it up with equally absurd rhetoric: “If you need a lesson in applied ethics, just watch me. I’m sure I can show you a thing or two.”

The Baron grinned. “Maybe one or two dead bodies.”

“Just saying, dead people don’t fight. That’s pragmatism.”

The Baron shook his head, then returned his attention to the passing architecture, the crunching gravel of the streets, and the chill bluster of the morning wind. “All I can learn from you is how to drink a bottle of bleach without looking like an idiot.”

“That’s a trick you can only do once,” the Zombie said.

The Baron took one more draw and knocked the ash off his cigar. He had enough left to save for the end of the ride. He’d need to clip the burned end first though. “It’s too bad. You look so refreshed after a cup of someone else’s household cleaners.”

“That’s just style,” the Zombie said with exaggerated swagger.

The Baron removed the guillotine cutter from his case and snipped the cigar short, then packed everything away for safekeeping. The driver turned onto Clinton Wharf and slowly rolled down the empty road towards an emptier cruise terminal. To the right, there were chained lots with cars in them, slowly cooking their interiors until they cracked like lakebed mud. It must’ve been mixed parking for guests and American employees on the cruise.

To the left, there were brick and tin Dutch-style factories, row after row, with empty-socket streetlights and barren trees standing at the corners like sentinels of winter or something worse. The Baron could imagine a time, as yet unseen, when nobody lit the streets or patched up the broken windows, and on dark nights, animals crawled over the sills to hide in deeper shadows.

Where the road came up against the river, Governors Island was clearly visible. In contrast with this barren stretch of Red Hook, the trees across the water were a bright spring green, and before manila-colored houses were stretches of lawn marked irregularly with docks and motor-pools circled in chain link fencing. Technically the island was a US Army base, but from here it looked like a high-class residential district, isolated from the darker world all around.

Further out, Manhattan’s skyline and the lacy pattern of the Brooklyn Bridge stood visible through the light-blue haze of pollution, appearing as flat as a painting.

The Baron knocked on the partition between them and the cabbie. A moment later, a little glass door was opened to receive instructions. “Barilla’s Shoes, over there,” he said. There was a factory half a block from the water with light blue letters bolted to the facade.

The cabbie pulled up outside the factory and stopped. They’d paid ahead of time, no need to pay now, and they got out.

“Atheist!” a man shouted at them. “Devils!”

The warm, almost joyous tone was a pistol shot, shattering the Baron’s renewed calm, and his pulse raced away like a champion horse. He felt as tight-chested as he had after smoking his first pipe of tobacco as a young man. They’d been beaten to their destination by the most powerful man on the continent after the Zombie himself.

Meister Schuler was watching them from the shadow of recessed double doors. He wore an Anglican cassock and fine Franklin-style bifocals with thin, brightly polished copper rims. He smiled warmly at the Baron and the Zombie, his dirty blonde hair all mussed, like an old uncle back from the funny farm to greet his favorite nephews.

The Baron’s response was more than polite. It was friendly, and genuinely so, because the Baron preferred friendship over whatever this man could do to his enemies. “Meister Schuler,” the Baron greeted the Diviner. It was time to button up his nerves and steel himself for a possible confrontation. In his heart, he was ready to fight back. To survive.

Meister Schuler’s smile turned into a happy grin. “My boys! Welcome!”

The cabbie waited, looking through the window at the exchange. He was probably wondering if he should hang around for the return fare and another fat tip, but the Baron waved him off. After a three-point turn, the cab left with a little too much speed, as if Clinton Wharf were a hostile place or a badlands, inimical to life or good health.

The air had the smell of dust, brick, and the ancient sourness of rancid, acidic motor oil. It definitely felt like dead Earth. It was easy on the eyes like cool ashes.

“Are you waiting for us?” the Zombie asked Schuler sweetly.

“No, no!” Schuler replied. “But I am glad to see you here. It’s a complicated Sunday, and I’ve had a lot to do. A lot on foot, you see, to walk to. A future to walk to.”

The Baron nodded, guessing that the Diviner was talking about the microtasks that usually called to him around the city. While this conversation was innately risky, the Baron needed to understand what they were up against, so he opted to push a little further: “Are your minders helping you today?” This question cut an important difference in the world. If New York sent Schuler, his minders would be close by. If he wandered off alone, then nobody would’ve known to chase after him.

The Diviner seemed briefly hurt by the question. “My friends? No. They had other things to do today, and this is business, real business, oh no. I came here, I walked, I listened with the gods. You understand. The future… the little things that I will do. To earn.”

“Prestige,” the Zombie offered.

“Exactly!” the Diviner yelled with delight.

The Baron weighed his next words carefully. They were almost certainly acting in indirect opposition to Schuler’s personal goals, so any moves made here had to be elegant, almost threatless. “We need to go inside,” he said, opting for the simplest tactic, utterly free of any connections to any other concepts. Even with this friendly atmosphere growing between them, he didn’t dare ask for permission. That might remind Schuler of any orders coming down from the New York cult—like a blanket request to deny them access to any more cultists.

Meister Schuler closed his eyes and silently repeated something to himself. He reached up with shaking fingers and touched the rims of his glasses, then let them drop. “Oh, oh, I don’t know. I was here to speak with someone important, but a very large man told me to wait outside, even after I told him my name, and everyone listens to my name, d’Holbach, everyone listens, but he didn’t. Oh no, no.” Schuler opened his eyes. “If you could hear the gods, they said to wait outside, and I don’t mind waiting because I know people are safe while I’m here!”

The Baron exchanged glances with the Zombie, who shrugged. He didn’t know how to play this. The Baron was the diplomat. The Zombie just frightened people, but Schuler wouldn’t be scared. The Baron said, “Did Barilla ask you to stand outside?”

“He asked his friend to ask me to wait. He is busy, and I’m busier.” Schuler looked up at the roof of the alcove. “Yes, I can hear it.”

This was a relief. Schuler either hadn’t been told, didn’t remember, or simply didn’t care about the Zombie’s assault on Tammany Hall last night. He seemed happy to be where he was, as if everything was already under control. It was time to extend a harmless olive branch. “Do you want me to ask Barilla to let you come speak with him?”

Schuler’s smile grew wider, revealing a child-like impishness that echoed a touch of the Zombie’s manic nature. “I’d love that. You’ll help, not hinder. It’s good that you would.”

The Zombie very, very carefully tapped the Baron on the shoulder and whispered into his ear, “How did he find this place?”

The Baron nodded. “We’ll talk about this inside,” he said loudly.

“No need!” Schuler bowed. “I’m here to help Barilla. Someone is unhappy about his work, yes sir. I…” He paused and looked distracted. Then he slowly stumbled back against the wall.

“Are you okay?” the Baron asked honestly.

“So much to do in the Congo Basin,” Schuler said quietly.

Without asking for elaboration, they opened the front door to Barilla’s Shoes and left one of New York’s most important figures idling on the doorstep like a messenger boy.

Throughout history, powerful cults had accepted and nurtured their Diviners because they demonstrably defied common sense. They couldn’t predict the future, not exactly, but when they weren’t debilitated or distracted by their condition, they seemed preternaturally aware of their surroundings. Worse, the capable ones were swimming in vast oceans of prestige. A perfect awareness of all tasks meant constant awareness of all opportunities, and it was claimed that they could sense and complete ancient tasks, assigned and forgotten hundreds or even thousands of years ago.

If it wasn’t for their incredible mental instability, cults would’ve demanded the creation of pet Diviners. Depending on one’s perspective, it was fortunate that someone like Schuler only came along once every few decades. It seemed to be something in their character or their nature that set them apart from the rest of the human species. It might be a specific, helpful madness, or maybe a technique that only a few stumbled across while trying to cope with the mental strain. Who knew? No Diviner had ever explained their supernatural stability, at least not in a way that led to reproducible results. In fact, most of the failed Diviners reversed the wish or eventually died in a gutter, choking on their own tongue in some horrible fit of neurological disease. Few were like Schuler, and few should want to be.

It still surprised the Baron that people risked the wish to hear everything the gods had to say. If an Oracle was sensitive to a local signal, a Diviner was an Oracle tuned into every channel on Earth, including stations that nobody else could hear. It was the crash of every ocean against every continent, funneled down into your ears like thunder, deafening.

How could a man keep such sharp hearing in a hurricane of thought? The Baron wished he knew; the answer might explain much about the true mechanisms of the world.

The shoe factory engulfed them, a voided sepulchre of wartime industry. Dusty streaks of waxed concrete floor spread between bare production tables, arrayed in lines for a process that’d been torn out years ago. Looking at the thin daylight, diffusing long and low across the factory from distant windows, the texture of the floor changed, revealing footpaths cut through time’s patient dusting. Boots had passed from door to door and nowhere else.

During World War 2, this shoe factory had been running on a government contract to produce footwear for soldiers in the Pacific. Hundreds of women had staffed these long, isolated lines, each with a single rote purpose. There hadn’t been any professional cobblers in the building—only seamstresses, cutters, stampers, and punchers, summing up to the raw human intelligence behind single-purpose machines. Manipulation was required to move part of a shoe from one skilled tool to another, professional cogs in a process. There was no art to shoemaking in a place like this. There was only an imitation of someone else’s original design.

Then the contracts had stopped, but the money wasn’t returned to the public wallet for spending on social or economic issues. They’d simply shifted from industry to R&D, putting their defense dollars to use on the next generation of Cold War technology while leaving industries like Barilla’s Shoes to starve.

It’d finally failed in the last couple years, the Baron guessed. Upon closer inspection of the nearest table, still-greasy boltholes and squares of freshly exposed lacquer suggested a relatively recent change.

The room itself was one long hall. It must’ve been filled from end to end with people doing the exact same job at once. To the left and right were suspended double doors much like a hospital. They swung both ways and would’ve allowed heavy carts to pass in either direction. Presumably there were other line rooms that’d served another purpose in the boot-crafting process. What they needed was to find Barilla’s office.

“Which way?” the Baron asked aloud. Maybe the Zombie had a guess.

In answer, a large man pushed through the right door, a meat slab dressed in black wool pants and a starch-white wool shirt. He had a newsie set high on his receding hairline.

“That way,” the Zombie answered.

“This is private property,” the large man said, as if that explained everything and put the matter to rest. When the Baron didn’t immediately respond, he added, “Scram.”

“We’re here to speak with Federico Barilla immediately.”

“Yeah, that’s too bad. Why don’t you go outside and get in line behind Mister Crackers with the glasses, and Barilla will call for you when he’s good and ready.”

“It’s a Sunday,” the Zombie said, implying that Barilla shouldn’t have much work.

The large man sneered. “Yeah, well, Barilla is so busy, he’s workin’ instead of prayin’ with his mother at the church. Now get before I call the police.”

“You don’t want to do that,” the Baron said.

A derisive snort. “Really? Barilla’s talking up a troupe of boys with zip-guns who might say otherwise. Now, do I want to call the police, or do I want to call the boys in here?”

“You don’t want to do either,” the Baron repeated. “We just helped the Ozone Park Boys with a shootout at the Belmont-Sutter Homes. They’d be unhappy if we were delayed.”

The man hesitated as he processed the facts. The Baron had dropped a lot of relevant names in one sentence. “Did someone send you here?”

“Bettino Lucci was murdered, but we managed to save Rufino Piazzi.”

The slab looked alarmed beneath his newsie.

The Baron decided to press for closure. “You’ll know him as the frog man who sank the Paines. We need to talk with Barilla.”

The Zombie let the thinnest crescent of a grin crack on his face. It was eerie to imagine how calm and well-behaved he was so shortly after a man’s death. It was a strange mixture of reservation and satisfaction, and the Baron had spent decades learning to recognize and handle it. It was almost too quiet for comfort, like a volcano stilled by sacrifice.

“Can I ask you a question,” the Baron said to the slab.

“Sure?”

“What is prestige?”

The man was nonplussed. “What, you mean fame?”

“Nevermind,” the Baron said, “show us to Barilla.” At least part of the staff was fully secular, which boded poorly for an open conversation with the boss.

They were led through several sets of doors to the far end of the factory, where cheap wood framing and dry walls sliced offices out of an unused production room. There was an office door, fancier than the others, which had been propped open with a surly looking child for a doorstop. The kid had a penny knife, blade out, and was threatening to scratch the soft wood.

A shout came out of the door, “Miles!”

The kid pointed the knife at the Zombie. “Mr. Barilla! Martin is bringin’ heat.”

“They ain’t fuzz,” said the slab, as he ducked into the office. The Baron followed him quickly, while the Zombie paused by the kid with the naked blade.

There were six more kids ranging from early teens to nearly twenty, each of them wearing the same mix of tight pants and short-sleeve dress shirts, their hair greased up into disaffected duck’s arses, just as shiny and water-resistant as the real thing.

One of the youngest boys had an arm in a cast slung to his chest. The eldest one next to him was rubbing the well-healed stumps of his right ring and middle fingers against the fabric of his pants. Likely the victim of a failed zip-gun, he nevertheless had a fresh chunk of wood with a hollow car antenna dangling off a belt loop, secured by a frayed shoestring.

Against the quality of his dress and the neatness of his hair, the improvised firearm was shockingly primitive. The firing pin appeared to be a tack taped to a huge rubber band, the kind used to clamp lumber together. One misfire and the car antenna barrel could pop, pulping more digits for a surgeon to amputate.

Next to him stood a very small, studious looking woman in her mid-40s. Her plain light blue blouse, makeup-free face and mousy beehive hairdo reminded the Baron of a high school teacher, but her sharp glare and shifting gaze suggested a keen attitude. The fact that she was standing in a small office with a street gang spoke volumes about her true skillset.

Behind her, seated behind a heavy wooden desk, there was Barilla, sweating profusely from sheer agitation. He was a large man, top-heavy from a youth of dock work and generally heavy in his late middle age. His hair was white and tidy, and he dressed like he starred in a Marlon Brando film. Unlike the rest of the Cosa Nostra, he didn’t enjoy the functional and dignified clothes of a laborer. He proudly donned the entirely fictional style that Hollywood had invented whole cloth, and he’d retroactively fooled himself—and his new subordinates—into believing that an expensive black suit gave you class.

“Martin,” Barilla snapped, glancing at his door guard. “What the fuck?”

“I know they’re tresspassing, boss—”

“Yes, they are—”

At that point, they started talking over each other so thoroughly that it wasn’t even a conversation, it was a verbal fistfight. The meat slab of a man “Martin” tried and failed to explain why he was leading the trespassers into some kind of war meeting, but Barilla wasn’t having it.

“Why are these men in my office?” he said repeatedly, coming back around to say it louder and louder whenever Martin failed to apologize and escort the Baron out of the building. Martin’s problem wasn’t a lack of loyalty. He was simply too smart to shut up and follow orders. He reasoned with an angry man. He argued common sense against territorial instinct.

It was stupid in its own special way.

“Get them out of here!” Barilla finally shouted, losing any last scrap of dignity in the process. “Get them the fuck out!”

“I’m sorry,” Martin said to the Baron.

“Federico Barilla,” the Baron said loudly, “what is prestige?”

Barilla stiffened, sitting up. “Wait, what?”

Martin hesitated. Was this an opportunity to ignore Barilla’s bad orders?

With that one question, the Baron knew that Barilla was not a particularly active cultist. Most neophytes memorized the London Password because it made them feel important. Barilla must’ve learned and forgotten it years ago.

“It’s God, right?” Barilla asked, filling the silence.

The woman with the beehive hairdo looked the Baron over. “Who are you?” she asked, taking the position of authority when Barilla was nominally in charge.

It struck the Baron that she might, in fact, be in charge somehow. “I’m Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach,” he answered, wondering if she’d recognize him. He hoped so.

“Then the man behind you is the Zombie?” she asked.

The Baron carefully avoided reacting, even though his urge was to shout with surprise. A woman cultist was rarer than a fist-sized diamond, and they were almost universally persecuted and driven to the margins of the system of prestige. Either Barilla was implicitly fighting against centuries of occult tradition in the west, or he was starkly ignorant, and a real honest to goodness member of the Cult of Artemis was using him to surreptitiously participate in New York occult society. Her question signaled the Baron clearly—I’m here, I recognize you, and this man doesn’t understand what’s happening. Keep my secret safe.

The Baron turned to face the Zombie, if only to hide his shock. “That’s him,” he said.

The Zombie grinned, immediately aware of the eyes on him. The kid at the door was holding the knife out at him for inspection. “Watch this,” he said. He reached out slowly and wrapped his hand around the naked blade of the teenager’s knife. The kid gawped. Then the Zombie gently yanked the knife away, fingers squeezed across cutting edges.

The teenager yelped, then smiled. This wasn’t frightening; this was machismo. “You ain’t hurt?” the kid asked.

“Nah, kiddo. I’m cool.” Like many of the criminals that the Baron had met, the Zombie treated children as strictly off limits, even if they were old enough to believe they were men. He never chose to frighten them or intimidate them, let alone hurt them. “How much for the penny knife?” he asked.

“It’s yours man,” the kid said proudly.

The Zombie folded up the knife and opened his palm for everyone to view. “No blood.”

“A magician?” Barilla asked the woman.

“He’s the Baron’s bodyguard,” she answered promptly.

The Cult of Artemis wasn’t actually a cohesive cult, didn’t worship Artemis, and had no connections to the original Cult that’d been nurtured in ancient Greece. It was more like a loose political alliance between female cultists. Since most of them worked alone by necessity, a codified set of rules obligated them to help and support each other whenever they met.

“Are they important?” Barilla asked her.

“Very,” she said, and she offered her hand to the Baron. “My name is Phyllis.”

He took her hand and shook once, briefly. “It’s good to meet you.”

The Cult of Artemis was a recent invention. Shortly after the Fall of Truth, Elizabeth—the Apostate—had penned a short bible of useful knowledge and important commandments about the system of prestige. Her book, Apostasy, was designed to be copied by hand and distributed to other women cultists. It outlined a cultic network, structurally ignorant of its full membership, which would allow female cultists to operate inside Christendom in opposition to the dominant religious institutions. Soon after printing the work, her immediate allies were captured or slaughtered and she was driven into hiding, but the change was irreversible. The book survived and multiplied along with the growing female cultic population, ensuring that the Cult of Artemis remained long after its original practitioners were scattered or hung till dead.

The Baron was confident that Phyllis had only revealed herself because he was an outsider of a different kind, though his position was uniquely easier. He was a man protected by the Zombie, and he had a reputation for peace. This made him a sleeping giant, and instead of increasing the threat of violence by having power at his back, his presence decreased it.

However, she also represented a risk. The Baron and Zombie couldn’t question Barilla about the Cat with Phyllis listening. She might try to take the Cat for herself, or worse, she might already have it and would make herself scarce the moment she knew they were looking for it.

“What’re you here for?” Barilla asked. “Make it quick. I’ve got the boys here for a pow-wow about the Cougars.”

“They been all over the north end of the wharf,” said the older boy with missing fingers.

“Don’t bother the man!” Barilla berated the gangster. “Let’s talk, Mr. Baron.”

“It’s just Baron d’Holbach, like a landed noble. The man outside—” He looked at Phyllis directly “—do either of you know him?”

“He’s some nutbar preacher from Manhattan,” Barilla said. “You here for him?”

“No, but he’s important to Tammany. After we’re done here, you should let him in.”

Barilla frowned skeptically. “And when will you be done here, exactly?”

“We just have a few questions. You set up the job to scuttle the SS John G Paines. Tammany Hall contract, right?”

“Sure, I helped Emanuele with my contacts in the Anastasia family. He had money, I had men. He didn’t make it back though. Man named Jacono had to sort everything out.”

“I know Jacono. So this Emanuele landed the job?”

“Of course he did, I don’t have time for this secret society bullshit. I would’ve had Phyllis do the work, but she’s just a woman and Anastasia’s boys got the blood of Sicily in them, real mafioso. You need a strong personality, and Emanuele wasn’t any muscle either. I had to take care of organizing everyone, to make sure they were a real team.”

Barilla seemed proud of his responsibilities in scuttling the ship, which was deeply odd, considering the result. Four of the seven on the task had died outright, and two more had died afterwards—or did Barilla not know? Regardless, the mission was a failure by almost all accounts. That’s why Schuler was waiting outside to talk with him.

“Jacono and Lucci were shot by someone looking for you.” The Baron waited for Barilla’s reaction.

The man seemed slow to understand. “Psycho boy got murdered?” he asked skeptically.

“Because he wouldn’t rat you out. Apparently his killers knew a little about who was on the ship, but they didn’t know who you were, or at least where to find you. They questioned Lucci this morning though, before they executed him. That’s why I’m here, Barilla. The enemy was slowed down after a couple of theirs died, but we need to move you before they catch up.”

Phyllis took one step in front of the desk, almost physically intervening to get the Baron’s attention. “Wait, who is after him?”

“Mercenaries of some kind. Can you think of anyone who’d want Barilla?”

Barilla answered, “Nobody should know I’m part of the ship deal unless one of the boys told them, and they’re all loyal members of the family.”

“Well, six of the seven are dead and I don’t think Piazzi hired these killers. We won’t know who gave you up unless we get a chance to question them.”

Phyllis interrupted again. “Any idea why they’d want to kill Barilla?”

The Baron was pleased, though he couldn’t say much in this company. She’d asked the questions that Barilla should’ve, acting as the brains behind Barilla’s cultic operations. It was unfortunate that he couldn’t answer her, not before he knew where the Cat o’ Nine Lives had gone. “We’re not sure, but Jacono was in some kind of shootout on the Paines. A third-party was on the ship.” He omitted the rest of the tale, waiting to measure their responses.

Phyllis stepped back to her faux-subordinate position at Barilla’s right hand. “Jacono told Mr. Barilla that much,” she admitted. “There was some kind of assassin on board.”

“We don’t know much either,” the Baron said, “but I must be blunt. There isn’t much time for discussion, Barilla, and there are a few sensitive questions we need to ask before we move. Mostly about the ship task, maybe a little about Emanuele.” In truth, he wanted just enough time to identify the Cat and its whereabouts. He suspected it would be in Barilla’s personal belongings, vastly undervalued in every sense of the word. If he knew what he was doing, he would’ve already handed it to New York and gone into hiding.

“Go ahead and ask,” Barilla said.

“They’re for your ears only,” the Baron said. “Step out into the hall?”

Phyllis didn’t hesitate. “If this is about occult matters, you’d do better to ask me, Baron. Mr. Barilla leaves most of the work in my hands.”

The Baron frowned, affecting an image of exhausted disapproval. “I’m afraid these questions are just for him.” He hated to adopt this tone, but he needed to push her out of the conversation, if only for a minute. “If he needs a woman’s input, he can ask for it.”

She squinted. The book Apostasy mentioned the Baron by name, both for his role in cultic history and for his social attitudes. He was a well-known progressive who’d written explicitly about women in favorable terms. Even in New York’s records, the Baron was listed as a Hound of Artemis, a term for an ally of the Cult of Artemis. In most mouths, it was an insult born from an era when calling someone a “dog” would end in bloodshed, but to a woman cultist, it meant that the Baron could be relied upon to provide support. To hear him say “woman” with such distaste was a strange sign, one she was obviously struggling to read.

Barilla scratched his cheek. “I don’t mind her listening. My people are loyal.”

“My presence is necessary,” Phyllis added carefully. “Mr. Barilla delegates the details. He’s a fine boss, but he won’t know much about the ship task.”

“It’s true,” Barilla said with pride, as if delegation were a talent.

The Baron shook his head slightly. “Everyone has secrets they need to keep.” He glanced once at Phyllis. “That makes them vulnerable, exploitable. They could be compromised.”

Barilla waved the idea away like a pesky fly. “No, not my people.” 

“This matter is too important to risk it,” the Baron pressed. “These are exceptional circumstances. I hate to be insistent, but there isn’t much of a choice here. Trust me.”

The subtext would be clear to Phyllis. The look of steel on her face suggested that she knew what was being threatened and resented it, but the very fact that they hadn’t ratted her out implied that they wanted to be on her side—as long as she stepped out of their way.

After a long pause, she finally relented: “Fine.”

And instantly, Barilla stood up with a huff of frustration. “Yes, fine, Baron, fine. I understand. We’ll have a conversation without Phyllis.” He whistled and snapped his fingers. “Martin, come with me and the Baron. This will all be fucking fine!”

The Zombie sidled up beside Baron d’Holbach. His bored expression was actually mild worry, but he was very good at hiding his concern.

The Baron knew why he was upset. Barilla was fighting with them through malicious compliance, wasting precious time. ”I meant that I’d talk to you alone,” the Baron said. “This isn’t about Phyllis. Anyone could be a security risk.”

“Just talk to him,” Phyllis said, barely containing her own frustration. Then she side-eyed Barilla. “If you need me, boss, you’ll call for me?”

Barilla sniffed airily. “If I need you,” he agreed. “Are you game, Baron?”

The Baron suppressed a frown. At this rate, someone outside of their control would hear about the Cat, but if the Baron could at least get ahead of everyone—or if the Zombie could run ahead and attempt to capture the artifact—then they might be able to recover it without starting an occult war. As it was, this conversation was the only way forward, so he gave up on strict control. Luck would shape events, and then he’d react to them. “After you. Let’s talk.”

Author’s Note:

I really enjoy writing Phyllis.

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

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June 30, 2026