I push through the crowd to the end of the bar. It’s not hard to spot Church. He’s taking up a lot of real estate. No one wants to get near him. Once upon a time his clothes were nicer than Cabal Ash’s, but he smells worse and he looks like he’s been sleeping under freeway overpasses for a week. Both of his hands are flat on the bar. His nails are long, dirty, and broken. He’s got a thousand-yard stare aimed at the far wall. Between a hundred voices yammering and the jukebox, he doesn’t hear me coming. I motion for Carlos to come get his attention.
I’m right behind Church when Carlos eyeballs him.
“What the hell are you doing here, man? I told you you weren’t welcome here.”
Church doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. He just stares straight ahead. I nod to Carlos to try it again.
“Hey, asshole. You need to get out. Like now. Like five minutes ago. And don’t come back.”
This time Church seems to notice he’s being yelled at. He slowly raises his head, like a Sphinx waking up after a thousand-year nap. He moves his lips and makes a small sound.
“What?” Carlos asks. He moves closer. “What?”
Church growls and half leaps across the bar, grabbing at Carlos with his filthy claws. His mouth is open and he’s craning his neck like he wants to bite him. Carlos is yelling and bracing his arms against the bar. Church makes a gurgling growl. The floor clears as people try to get away from the chaos.
Church snaps black teeth at Carlos’s face, missing it by an inch. I grab the back of Church’s head and smash it down on the bar. I can feel his jaw crack, but it doesn’t even slow him down. He turns and lunges at me. He’s growling and biting the air, only his mouth isn’t working too well anymore. His shattered lower jaw flaps around like a baggie full of oatmeal. His teeth and tongue are black as tar. Someone must have slipped something interesting into his syringe. But even meth won’t rot your mouth that fast. What’s he on?
Church grabs my arms and opens his black pit of a mouth. He’s strong for a skinny guy. Must have pumped out a year’s worth of adrenaline in the last thirty seconds.
Cue my own little panic attack. What if Church only seems strong because I’ve got a Samson hair thing going on and I’m getting weaker as my scars fade?
His teeth snap next to my ear.
One way to find out.
I grab Mr. Oatmeal Jaw’s shoulder, spin, and toss him like a bag of trash. He flies the full length of the bar and smashes into the back wall, leaving an extremely satisfying dent in the plaster. While I’m admiring my work, feeling a warm, giddy sense of relief that I can still do unreasonable amounts of damage to my fellow man, Church rolls onto his side and stands up. He’s holding his body at a funny angle. It looks like his back cracked when he hit the wall. His left arm is badly dislocated. It hangs by his side, as limp as his jaw. If he’s in pain, he doesn’t show it. He teeters, gets his balance, and rushes me.
His head jerks back and then explodes. Not all of it. Just the back. An exit wound.
I spin around to see who fired and there’s Brigitte, up on the bar, kneeling and holding a weird little pistol in a double-hand cop grip. A white wisp of CO2 curls out of the gun barrel.
I’m thinking When the hell did you turn into Emma Peel? but before I can say it, two more hungry-black-mouth scarecrows come stumbling in. Brigitte turns and blasts one before he gets more than three steps inside. The other one lunges for a woman by the jukebox. A blond civilian wearing her girlfriend’s oversize leather jacket. Lucky for her that her girl rides. Scarecrow Guy latches onto her shoulder, but can’t bite through the thick leather. The blonde’s girlfriend pulls her one way while I get an arm around the guy’s throat and pull him the other. It doesn’t help. He’s not choking and he won’t let go of the jacket.
“Break his neck!”
It’s Brigitte.
“Don’t let him scratch her! Snap his neck!”
I slip my arm from around his throat, grab his jaw and the back of his head, and twist sharply. You can hear the crack of vertebrae and his spinal cord snapping over the music. I know this because everyone in the bar groans at exactly the same time. He drops to the ground near the scarecrow Brigitte shot. The crying blonde falls back on her girlfriend, who pulls her away. They bump into a table and a bottle smashes on the floor. The sound is like a starter’s pistol going off. Everyone in the bar decides to go batshit simultaneously and stampede over each other trying to get outside. In less than a minute it’s just Brigitte, Carlos, the corpses, and me. Except for a couple of drunk Deadheads slumped at a corner table in their purple necromancer robes.
The less drunk one shakes his head at us.
“Big deal. The soccer games at necromancer school were rougher than that.”
“We’re closed,” says Carlos.
The Deadheads stagger out while Brigitte and I drag the corpses into the back. Carlos goes to the doors and locks them.
“Can one of you tell me what the goddamn hell just happened?” I ask.
I look at Brigitte.
She says, “Don’t worry. Whatever you think you saw, no one died here tonight.”
“You’re saying Church and the others were already dead?” asks Carlos.
Brigitte nods.